Welcome To Everytown: A Journey Into The English Mind

Description

What do the English think? Every country has a dominant set of beliefs and attitudes concerning everything from how to live a good life, how we should organize society, and the roles of the sexes. Yet despite many attempts to define our national character, what might be called the nation s philosophy has remained largely unexamined. Until now. Philosopher Julian Baggini pinpointed postcode S66 on the outskirts of Rotherham, as England in microcosm an area which reflected most accurately the full range of the nation s inhabitants, its most typical mix of urban and rural, old and young, married and single. He then spent six months living there, immersing himself in this typical English Everytown, in order to get to know the mind of a people. It sees the world as full of patterns and order, a view manifest in its enjoyment of gambling. It has a functional, puritanical streak, evident in its notoriously bad cuisine. In the English mind, men should be men and women should be women (but it s not sure what children should be). Baggini's account of the English is both a portrait of its people and a personal story about being an alien in your own land. Sympathetic but critical, serious yet witty, Welcome to Everytown shows a country in which the familiar becomes strange, and the strange familiar.

Julian Baggini is the editor and co-founder of The Philosophers Magazine. His books include Do You Think What You Think You Think? (with Jeremy Stangroom), What s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life and the bestselling The Pig That Wants to be Eaten, all published by Granta Books.

'This is a thoughtful, sympathetic portrait of white working-class life which is essential reading' Guardian