A runaway bestseller in the UK, "Watching the English" is now available in the U.S. for the first time! Witty and wise, Kate Fox reveals the quirks, habits, and foibles of the English people. Putting the national character under her microscope, Fox explores this strange and fascinating culture, governed by a complex set of unspoken rules and a bizarre code of conduct. Through anthropological analysis and a series of unorthodox experiments (often using herself as a reluctant guinea-pig), Fox discovers what these unwritten codes tell us about Englishness: the rules of weather-speak, the ironic-gnome rule, the reflex apology rule, the paranoid-pantomime rule, class anxiety tests, and the money-talk taboo, among others. "Watching the English" is a biting, affectionate, insightful, and often hilarious look at English society.

In an insightful and engrossing book, Fox explains the puzzling behavior of her fellow Englishmen in an informal way that puts other social anthropologists to shame. While she uses some academic lingo, Watching the English is far from being a dry read or a clinical observation of a certain group of people... Despite being more than 400 pages long, Watching the English reads easily, but is still jam-packed with information and tidbits about the English, and non-English readers are bound to at least once exclaim, 'What?! The English really do that?'--Camille Tuutti-Winkler, Examiner.com