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The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British | 
 enlarge | Author: Sarah Lyall
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  30 reviews
Sales Rank: 1464
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 0393058468
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.086
EAN: 9780393058468
ASIN: 0393058468
Publication Date: August 18, 2008
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Product Description
Dispatches from the new Britain: a slyly funny and compulsively readable portrait of a nation finally refurbished for the twenty-first century.
Sarah Lyall, a reporter for the New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s and soon became known for her amusing and incisive dispatches on her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life. The roller-coaster decade of Tony Blair's New Labor government was an increasingly materialistic time when old-world symbols of aristocratic privilege and stiff-upper-lip sensibility collided with modern consumerism, overwrought emotion, and a new (but still unsuccessful) effort to make the trains run on time. Appearing a half-century after Nancy Mitford's classic Noblesse Oblige, Lyall's book is a brilliantly witty account of twenty-first-century Britain that will be recognized as a contemporary classic.
"The Anglo Files should be handed out, as a public service, in the immigration line at Heathrow." -Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink
"When Sarah Lyall married an Englishman and moved to London ten years ago, few around her realized she was a modern-day Tocqueville—otherwise they would have been much more guarded. The happy result is The Anglo Files, a razor-sharp, hilarious, wickedly insightful, decidedly biased account of Everything British."— Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair
"Superb social and cultural anthropology by a reporter who has lived among her subjects without losing her sense of wonder for them. Imagine Margaret Mead channeling Jon Stewart and you have Sarah Lyall."—Eric Lax, author of Conversations with Woody Allen
"Sarah Lyall brings all the virtues of the best American journalism, including accuracy, to the task of analysing all the vices of British society, including hypocrisy, venality and hopeless confusion about sex. She will now be hailed as one of England's supreme analysts, preparatory to her being executed on Tower Green."—Clive James, author of Cultural Amnesia
"For years now Sarah Lyall has been the wittiest observer of the English and their curious habits. Now she's written a book that takes her game to an entirely new level. It's funny, it's delightful and anyone with even a passing interest in these strange people should read it." -Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball
"By turns wry, mordant, affectionate, bitter and sweet. I never miss any of her dispatches because, while they manage to remind me why I left, they also contrive to make me feel occasionally homesick." -Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
Very enjoyable read! November 20, 2008
I enjoyed this book through and thorough. Very informative, witty, insightful, and well-written. The chapter on CLASSES had me laughing outloud more than once. Highly recommended!
 Intelligent and Insightful November 13, 2008
Well researched as well as full of firsthand experiences.
Organized into chapters dealing with topics:
- attitudes towards sexuality
- members of the Houses of Parliament - way of setting laws
- newspapers
- alcoholic consumption
- cricket
- language differences between upper and lower classes
- House of Lords - changes to what it was and now is
- self-deprecation
- eccentricity and tolerance towards
- hedgehogs
- bad teeth
- expansion of products and consumerism since WWII
- stiff upper lip
- using weather as both an ice breaker and a barrier to intimacy
The above are general because the chapters touch on larger observations.
What is not covered is the effect of the influx of multiple former Empire cultures such as Indians and Jamaicans except to the extent it has expanded the British diet/restaurants.
Good ending chapter on further reading.
I read the Kindle version. Active table of contents and the hyperlinks between footnotes and back to the chapter are flawless.
Read it and weep (with laughter)! November 11, 2008
I picked up this book when my husband was in the ICU of our local hospital, and I hoped that it would provide a momentary diversion from a ghastly situation. In fact, from the first chapter I found myself muffling my guffaws so that the nurses didn't think I was some kind of loon. I even got impatient when my husband wanted to talk. He was distracting me from my glorious distraction!
In creating this wonderful testimony to British quirkiness Sarah Lyall has expanded upon the old adage that the U.K. and the U.S. are "two countries divided by a common language" to include the different ways in which the British view politics, culture and even sex. The chapter on how differently the British parliamentary system functions from our congressional one is both insightful and charming. The one on British men's hang-ups on sex is, well, eye-opening. And although I have a couple of minor complaints with this book (for example, the chapter on cricket is as tedious as the sport itself)I give Lyall high marks for not falling victim to the temptation to write yet another sappy book of Anglophilia.
Most of us who have lived in England as expatriates or had extensive stays there as tourists instantly recognize that we are in a foreign country. (All you have to do to reach this conclusion is read the letters to the editor of the Times of London.) But Ms. Lyall's experience, in that she has been a working journalist and the wife of a British writer, goes beyond what most of us experience. As such, it is a richer and deeper exposure to British culture and her approach, full of humor and a strong sense of irony, has produced a magical book. Cheers!
 As revealing about the author as the subject November 8, 2008
To someone who does not know the British this will provide an entertaining, if somewhat alarming, introduction to the subject. Some of the observations are spot-on (cricket and sadly, alcohol - in even small towns every weekend is like Spring Break with drunken teens rendering centres 'no go' areas for those less inebriated). However, other observations seem to be colored more by the author's own prejudices - which are occasionally, but rarely acknowledged. For example, visitors to Britain may be surprised to find most of them have (nearly) all their own teeth. Lyall would have you believe otherwise. And for someone who has married a Brit, and has two British children, a tone of laughing with her subject - rather than at them, might have been less condescending. Finally, in a breathtaking display of ignorance of how the British make tea, the jacket cover shows a tea bag being put in a cup - after a week in London (let alone a decade) every American would know they use a tea pot. While this is not the author's fault, it does betray the problem with the book - the triumph of condescending point scoring over understanding or much empathy.
Tea drinking, class obsessed, sexually repressed, socially reserved, determinedly eccentric, emotionally distant? November 5, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Basically serves as a confirmation of British stereotypes (tea drinking, class obsessed, sexually repressed, socially reserved, determinedly eccentric, emotionally distant), with examples from Lyall's experience as an expatriated American married to an English man. As such, it was mildly amusing, nothing more.
In fact, Lyall grew up in New York City, according to her book-flap bio, which means I have to translate her observations through another filter, as her "American" experience does not reflect mine; I was born in a small Pennsylvania town and grew up on a 19th-century farm house at the end of a gravel lane. I never visited New York City until an adult, and have spent probably five days total there as a visitor; Nor have I ever been to England, even though I have been to Canada, and I do work remotely with some team members in England and Ireland (also China, which is neither here nor there, and in any case "working remotely" does not constitute even glancing knowledge of culture and peoples). Oh, and I also attended an employer-sponsored orientation which included folks from England, Ireland, and Scotland, whose conversation amongst themselves, especially in the happy hour after the daytime sessions, was completely incomprehensible to my ears, and where the man from England, attempting to explain to the listening Americans what a "budgie" was, finally resorted to exclaiming in exasperation "You, know a budgie, like Tweetybird!" then shook his head and muttered sadly "Civilization only extends so far."
I did find interesting the sense of "otherness" that Lyall felt amongst her adopted nation, even after many years and raising two daughters there. There is no mistaking the differences amplified, not dampened, by the common language.
Not a life-changer, but a pleasant way to pass a few hours, especially if you are on your way to or from a trip to England.
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