The English feel that they are distinct from Europe, they are also tugged across the Atlantic too, so it is a good location, just off the corner of this great Eurasian mass and directed towards the Atlantic.
My father was obviously lower middle class in all sorts of ways. In my mid-teens I was obsessed by class and ambitious to rise from, lower middle class origins. I asked my father what class are we ? He said: we're too intelligent to go by that system, we're the intelligentsia.
When I was of that age, there was a vast gulf between state schools and public schools and it was a class gulf. But now, I think, it's no longer a reflection of class, it's a reflection of money. Money has won. It has always won in America but now it's won in England too. So if you put your son's name down for Eton it's because you can afford to do that, it's not because it's any class-granted right. I have no nostalgia for the class society but I have no very great enthusiasm about the money society.
If one's allowed to be proud of one's nationality, then you would have to advance British history as a model of moderation compared to the histories of most other countries.
England had its revolution a century earlier than the French, a parliamentary democracy was well established in the 18th century. The Civil War was not atrocious as civil wars usually are.
I am utterly comfortable with being English as Americans might say, it's a source of quiet pride.
From Martin Amis's England BBC4.