Eager Anglophiles

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Suddenly at the end Buruma sours, not on the Anglophiles he has been writing about, but on the English, or at least on the heirs of Margaret Thatcher and the Little Englanders. Today it is the British, he says, who more than any others see Europe as a threat to their freedom. He is irritated at their complacency and philistinism and fears that their opposition to European Union policies has conjured up the image of a Continent "where Britons go only to wage wars of freedom." Too many Englishmen, he warns, are showing signs of xenophobia and nasty nativism. "The British myth...can serve liberty, but also a resentment of anything foreign."

This is a headsnapping change of viewpoint and tone. For most of its pages, Voltaire's Coconuts, as the title suggests, takes a fondly ironic view, praising the philosophers and gently puncturing some of the odder passions of those it labels Anglomanes. But Buruma's final polemic plants the suspicion that maybe all those admirers of things British were wrong. An English gentleman could rightly insist that this sort of thing is not playing fair with the reader.