Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour - Softcover

Fox, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857885082 ISBN 13: 9781857885088

Publisher: UNKNO, 2008

Synopsis

A runaway bestseller in the UK, Watching the English is now available in the U.S. for the first time! Witty and wise, Kate Fox reveals the quirks, habits, and foibles of the English in her book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. Putting the national character under her microscope, Fox explores this strange and fascinating culture, governed by a complex set of unspoken rules and a bizarre code of conduct. Through anthropological analysis and a series of unorthodox experiments (often using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Fox discovers what these unwritten codes tell us about Englishness: the rules of weather-speak, the ironic-gnome rule, the reflex apology rule, the paranoid-pantomime rule, class anxiety tests, and the money-talk taboo, among others. Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful, and often hilarious look at English society.

About this title

About the Author:

Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, is Co-Director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford and a Fellow od the Institute for Cultural Research. The author or co-author of four previous books, Fox's work centers on intriguing aspects of human behaviour including pub culture, gossip, flirting, horseracing, mobile phones, email, stress, drugs, crime, violence and social taboos. She lives in London.

Review:

In an insightful and engrossing book, Fox explains the puzzling behavior of her fellow Englishmen in an informal way that puts other social anthropologists to shame. While she uses some academic lingo, Watching the English is far from being a dry read or a clinical observation of a certain group of people... Despite being more than 400 pages long, Watching the English reads easily, but is still jam-packed with information and tidbits about the English, and non-English readers are bound to at least once exclaim, 'What?! The English really do that?' (Camille Tuutti-Winkler, Examiner.com)

About this edition

• Publisher: UNKNO
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1857885082
• ISBN 13: 9781857885088
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 440