English national identity
365
MENTIONS
129
EPISODES
112
PODCASTS
Search complete. 365 mentions across 129 episodes found for "English national identity".
Nov 6, 2026
Alexander MercourisHOST
Some of its positions, to my mind, border on, well... not just English nationalism, but go beyond English nationalism.
Alexander MercourisHOST
As somebody pointed out, and I think this is a fair point, if you subjected their definition of Englishness to the king, then he would not be English because of some of his German ancestors.
Alexander MercourisHOST
And I obviously would not fall within that definition because, as we know, I am ethnically Greek.
Alexander MercourisHOST
So I do have those concerns.
Marvin ReesGUEST
I mean, what does it mean to be British, right? And what does it mean to be English? These aren't things that sit in an abstract.
Marvin ReesGUEST
They sit in a context that we inherit Englishness.
Marvin ReesGUEST
We don't make it up in the moment.
Marvin ReesGUEST
And that's what I mean.
Jamie SimonGUEST
So I think this idea of reaching across the five continents is quite exciting.
David WattHOST
Is there a little bit of the American market that just loves the Englishness of the market?
Jamie SimonGUEST
Interesting enough, I think there is some attraction to London and Scotland and Ireland as well.
Jamie SimonGUEST
But really, we are seeing US clients wanting to be in France and Italy and Greece and places like that.
David MusgroveHOST
One of the things that always strikes me as interesting in this year, we've talked about kind of the different spheres of influence that England has been subject to for the last 50 years from Denmark and now Normandy as well.
David MusgroveHOST
So like different sort of groups of people are circulating around the country, aren't they? I wonder how far people who lived in what is now England associated themselves with Englishness and would naturally have thought they need to be behind Harold, or whether there would have been a substantial cohort of people who would have thought, well, essentially, I'm Danish, or I'm Scandinavian, or I'm Norwegian, I'll be on Hardrada's side, the king who invades the north, or I feel more Norman than anything, I'll be on William's side.
David MusgroveHOST
What was nationalism at the time?
Tom LicenceGUEST
I think it's fair to say then as now that identity and ethnicity are complex things in 11th century England.
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
I do not think it's his masterpiece, but let's save that for later.
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
What the novel did, and why it was able to gain such a prominent position in the literary imaginary, let's just put it that way, is because of Achebe's education, which was an elite British education, and therefore he did have an intimate relationship with the great Western tradition, with its institutions, and with Englishness, broadly defined.
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
We've now categorised him as the anti-colonial novelist by excellence, but it's a lot more complicated than that.
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
First of all, we've got to think this is someone who's British educated and who had a very strong connection and love, I might say, for British tradition and culture in the most elite sense of the word.
9 MINS LATER
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
the social nuances of British English speech, the ways in which people, you know, upper class, upper middle class people talk when they are at a party or when they talk about Africa and when they're trying to be polite and paternalistic in the same way and when they get into all these sorts of models.
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
It's something he started doing when he was very, very young.
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
Again, when I talk about that intimate connection to Englishness, he has it.
Terri OchiaghaGUEST
He knows precisely.
Ben HighmoreGUEST
Cosmopolitan.
Ben HighmoreGUEST
She was really enjoying that kind of sense of a kind of bigger world, a world that's away from a kind of enclosed Englishness and enclosed kind of Britishness.
Ben HighmoreGUEST
And I read lots of oral history, testimony, people remembering things and things like people remembering the first yogurts that they had in Britain and the sense of them feeling modern.
Ben HighmoreGUEST
Suddenly they felt modern.
Catherine HallGUEST
Well, I think that was, you know, that was then and now we're somewhere different.
Catherine HallGUEST
And I always knew that what I was doing was exploring Englishness because that's what I grew up into and that's what I was and am.
Catherine HallGUEST
And I never did, you know, I never did serious work on Scotland or Wales or Ireland.
Catherine HallGUEST
But I think now, I mean, as we now look at... you know, what's going to happen? Is there going to be a UK? I mean, I don't think it's at all clear what's going to happen.
speaker_1SOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
i may the beauty of them not sustain
Jon JacobHOST
Now would be a good time for me to introduce my noddy assessment, or what I think is a noddy assessment, which is that there is absolutely a sense of Englishness, whatever that means musically.
Jon JacobHOST
And yet it's not twee.
Jon JacobHOST
It doesn't feel overtly pastoral.
Jon JacobHOST
It feels actually quite fresh, like we're having a cold shower.
Jon JacobHOST
But as in there is something quite modern about that take on Englishness.
Jon JacobHOST
And first of all, I don't know whether that, obviously that makes sense in my head.
Jon JacobHOST
It doesn't necessarily make sense to other people.
Christopher HitchensGUEST
I thought, here's a guy who seems to understand my family, which I despaired of any novelist ever doing.
Christopher HitchensGUEST
So there's that, and a certain attitude to Englishness, perhaps.
Christopher HitchensGUEST
And we seem to have some of the same taste in prose, but otherwise, the hell with it.
Christopher HitchensGUEST
My God, I was lucky enough to get out of this and get to university.
Ryan McMakenNARRATOR
Professor Toombs perhaps has that in mind when he criticises Englishmen who campaign to denigrate English history and the culture wars by peddling evil British Empire narratives and demanding reparations for historic injustices that they pin uniquely on England.
Ryan McMakenNARRATOR
Toombs says, Schools, universities and cultural institutions across England, from the National Trust via the Museums Association to the Church of England, are busy undermining Englishness by propagating distorted and negative histories to make the native-born ashamed and the newly arrived resentful.
Ryan McMakenNARRATOR
at the root of many of our most debilitating national problems, including excessive immigration, are decisions deliberately made by thoroughly English, or sometimes Scottish, politicians, officials and lawyers.
Ryan McMakenNARRATOR
Ideals are, of course, a fundamental part of national identity.
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