Voltaire's Coconuts: or Anglomania in Europe

Ian Buruma

Gosh what hard work this one was. I picked it up looking for a topical and entertaining history of England's relationship with Europe but got bogged down in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Definitely not my period, darling. Too much Goethe, Voltaire, Herzl, Marx and de Coubertin (all Anglophiles of one kind or another, according to Buruma) and not enough from the last century. Buruma would say that this is because by the 1900s the prerequisite conditions for Anglophilia - Britain's status as the world's supreme democratic and, more importantly liberal, power - had been superseded by the rise of the United States. The book does have interesting things to say about the British values admired by Europeans in the 19th century (liberalism, tolerance, stability, economic success, class mobility) and those aspects of British society which were sneered at (love of money, lack of culture) and how these are parallelled in the world view of the United States today. But that comparison is probably worthy of a whole separate book.

The best bits of the book deal with Buruma's own personal history. The story of one half of his family's arrival in Britain as German Jews before the first world war is full of fascinating insight (his grandfather was a miniature Oscar Schindler during WWII). It's only a shame that the personal stuff appears merely at the start and end of the book.