The American Anglophile is a recognizable type. It is usually the Harris tweed jacket that gives him away, or the Savile Row suit. Instead of neat buttons on either side, his shirts have those odd cutaway collars that the English favor. His accent may be more Ivy League than Oxbridge, but every now and then he throws in telling Anglicisms, such as Gatsby's “old sport.” Come to think of it, Fitzgerald's character is the archetypal Angloyank. And all right-thinking Americans should despise such phonies, of course.

American Anglophilia does not feature in Ian Buruma's rich and charming new book, [Anglomania,] though tweed jackets do. Buruma's gaze is directed eastward from England, toward the Anglophiles of continental Europe. When Europeans these days discuss the question of Britain's relationship with Europe, Anglophilia is in fact something of a non-issue. Everyone, it seems, is an Anglophile now. Of course we love the English, say sadly puzzled German politicians; what we cannot understand is why, more than half a century after the end of World War II, the English still hate us. Even the French these days find it hard to loathe the English as much as they loathe the Americans. But these developments have not retired Buruma's subject. Quite the contrary: in seeking to trace the historical roots of this now quite general Anglophilia, Buruma is onto something interesting.

This is a book rooted in its author's own history. Half-Dutch on his mother's side and educated in Holland, Buruma was introduced to Anglophilia by his paternal grandfather, who was the son of a German-Jewish immigrant. Attracted to England by Billy Bunter and the Beatles in almost equal measure, the young Buruma at some point took the decision to Anglicize himself completely. The proof that he had achieved this came in 1990, when he was appointed foreign editor of The Spectator, a magazine that evolved during the 1980s into the house journal of Thatcherite “Young Fogeys.” They were, you might say, the English Anglophiles, even if the object of their affections was the England of at least a century ago.

Like so many continental Anglophiles, however, Buruma found that his admission to the inner sanctum was an apotheosis marred by self-doubt. Was he really at home in this oak-paneled parody of a Senior Common Room? Was it the weight of his tweed jacket that was making him perspire, or the fact that the man inside it wasn't quite English enough? Or was it the ghastly realization that his colleagues had feet of clay inside their delightful handmade brogues? “In the end I felt ill at ease with young people who had never thought of trying anything else, who had walked only on well-trodden paths, whose main aim was to conserve the system in which they had got on, and who looked at any alternative with amused contempt.”

Buruma drew the line when one of his colleagues suggested the arch-imperialist Enoch Powell as a possible contributor on the subject of Indian politics in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination—not a bad bit of whimsy by Spectator standards, but the last straw for Buruma. This, then, is Buruma's theme: the ambivalence of Anglophilia. Each of the book's fifteen essays explores the particular problem that, while it is easy to love the English (especially from afar), it is harder to consummate that love—or even to be certain that one's love is reciprocated.

Buruma begins with Voltaire. In Britain, his book is nicely titled Voltaire's Coconuts, alluding to Voltaire's observation that, just as coconuts take time to ripen in Rome, so English laws and liberties would take time to be adopted in France. Voltaire's point was that eventually they could. As Buruma shows, however, he did not like English liberties in practice half as much as he liked them in theory. Voltaire's England turns out to have been the England of his imagination: an anti-France rather than a real country. In the same way, Goethe's love of Shakespeare had more to do with a German reaction against French classicism than a genuine Anglophilia: the aim was to reinvent Shakespeare as a Gothic genius. “Shakespeare my friend,” enthused Goethe on the day he had designated “William's Day” (October 14, 1771), “if you were with us today, I could live only with you.” This Sturm und Drang Shakespeare, of course, has his analogue in today's Oscar-winning Will.

As the Bard might have said, some are born Anglophiles, some achieve Anglophilia, and some have Anglophilia thrust upon them. Anglophilia was clearly thrust upon that generation of continental revolutionaries—Marx being the most famous—who were forced to emigrate to England after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. As the grandson of Queen Victoria, however, Kaiser Wilhelm II belongs firmly in the first category of born Anglophiles. Here Buruma makes good use of the researches of John Roehl, the Kaiser's biographer. Told ad nauseam by his mother to prefer liberal England over militarist Prussia, the young Wilhelm staged one of the most historically significant of all teenage revolts by rejecting the former and embracing the latter. In 1940, a pathetic and moribund exile in Holland, he rejoiced at the impending “Last Judgment on Juda-England.”

By contrast, and it is an important contrast, Anglophilia was achieved, faute de mieux, by Theodor Herzl. A born and bred Germanophile, Herzl would never have turned to England, or indeed to Zionism, if he had not first been snubbed by his anti-Semitic Pan-German chums and ignored by the Kaiser himself (not to mention the Rothschilds, though Buruma does not quite see the significance of this). The growing appeal of England to continental Jews rejected by the lands of their birth is the other big theme of Buruma's book: his own great-grandfather, and Isaiah Berlin, and the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner all appear as exemplars of it. Despite flickers of suspicion (to which Buruma is very sensitive, especially when aired by such haughty critics as David Watkin, the anti-Pevsner of Peterhouse), the English—including those on the political right—have generally reciprocated the sentiment. Buruma notes that Margaret Thatcher had a Jewish pen friend in the 1930s, who passed through Grantham when her family quit Nazi Vienna for South America. Was this the origin of her Germanophobia, which was so much in evidence in 1989?

To some readers, it must be said, some of this will be familiar. Buruma is digging in ploughed fields. Still, he has a genius for digging up unlooked-for gems. I had not realized that Herzl was such an ardent Wagnerian, nor that the overture to Tannhäuser was played at the opening of the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. It is also good to learn that fashionable French hostesses in the 1760s served their guests English-style roast beef. And I liked Buruma's quotation from that wonderful old fraud Prince Pückler-Muskau, who came to England to find a rich wife in 1826, about “the constant intrusion of the [English] newspapers into private life.” There is a lightness in the way Buruma wears his learning which is very appealing.

My main quibble is that the book is long on anecdote but short on analysis. The classic pitfall of any discussion of Englishness is to confuse it with Britishness. As a Scot, I speak with feeling on this point. Now, Buruma is not so naïve as to miss the point that a great deal of German Anglophilia (in the nineteenth century and today) was in fact Scotophilia: what they really loved were the ideas of Adam Smith and David Hume, or the Highlands as repackaged by Walter Scott. (Prince Albert is the classic example, and being made to wear a kilt was part of Wilhelm II's childhood trauma.)

But this is only part of the story. Buruma misses a trick by omitting from his account the crucial phenomenon of Scottish Anglophilia, an increasingly rare condition from which I am proud to suffer. Since James Boswell, no one has worked harder at turning little England into Great Britain than the Scotch Anglophiles, and the apparent decline of the species in these days of generalized Celtic nationalism—or at least their loss of self-confidence—is an important phenomenon, which at least deserved a mention. It is all too easy to forget, post-Braveheart, the contribution of Scottish writers such as Walter Scott and John Buchan to the development of an authentically British culture. Without the Scots' aptitude for commerce, engineering, emigration, and military ruthlessness, there would have been no Great Britain, and no British Empire.

Nor does Buruma adequately explain why so many continental Anglophiles did not become Americanophiles. When Garibaldi, Mazzini, Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin, and Herzen dined together to celebrate George Washington's birthday in 1854, why were they dining in London, and not in Washington itself? Was England simply handier for launching the next European revolution? A fuller discussion of Tocqueville's views on the relative merits of Britain and America might have helped. Tocqueville was always keen on the idea that the British aristocracy was a defender of liberty against the pretensions of the centralizing, sometimes egalitarian state. In America, he saw a similar role being played by the many religious sects. Given the choice between aristocratic England and sectarian America, the more cheerful revolutionaries (such as Herzen) tended to opt for the former.

Even more regrettable are Buruma's attempts to give what is a fine work of cultural history some immediate contemporary relevance. There are too many forced parallels between nineteenth-century European attitudes to England and present-day attitudes to the United States. For example: “Just as the global appeal of Hollywood movies has something to do with the nature of America, the universal appeal of Shakespeare's plays tells us something about the society in which they were created.” This is otiose. Still, these lapses aside, Buruma has written a deeply intelligent book that is a pleasure to read. Above all, he has a nicely oblique, understated sense of humor. Perhaps it is that—the subtle intimation that life and the human universe are really rather droll—which sets the fully-fledged Englishman apart from the mere Anglophile.