A review by tiggum
Watching the English by Kate Fox

3.0

There's a lot of interesting and amusing stuff about English culture and behaviour in this book, and I mostly enjoyed it, but the way it's written is frequently irritating. For one thing, the author's use of language is very, very repetitive, and she uses some words and phrases that I found quite irritating, such as "Eeyoreishness", "oh, come off it", "social dis-ease" repeatedly throughout.

There's also the false pretense that the author is just some idiot with no special knowledge and that she's coming upon this information in the same order the reader is and formulating her conclusions as she goes, and obviously that's not the case; Fox is an accomplished anthropologist and books aren't written like that. She collected the information first and put it together in a specific and intentional order, and pretending that that's not the case seems pointless and dumb.