Foreign News: Mr. John Bull

The 20th Century's "most English of the English" was really half Celt (on his mother's side)—and made a point of saying so when he was among Scots. "I remember that in my early days," Stanley Baldwin once said, "it was with difficulty that one could stand up while the band was playing God Save the King, because we had a Hanoverian and not a Jacobite king." More significant was the rest of his background: upper middle class, Harrow-Cambridge, chapel-turned-Church, just the proper mixture of trade and land and what he proudly admitted were...