Foreign News: The Isles of the Blest

While the U.S. keeps looking around uncertainly for its misplaced national purpose, Britain last week was taking a comfortable look at its native culture. A 76-page addition to the London Times Literary Supplement examined "The British Imagination" in a score of fields, ranging from poetry to science, women to snobbery. What the critical searchlight revealed, concluded the Times editorially, was "more diversity than richness, [a] greater sense of experimentation, consolidation, detachment, compromise (all the British virtues in fact) than actual positive achievement."

Inevitable Comparisons. There is bland acceptance of the fact that much...