If you ask your friendly AI engine to define the character of Britishness, you get something like this: “Britishness is the art of acting unbothered while caring deeply, queuing patiently while seething quietly, being polite reflexively and ironic instinctively – and binding this together with a shared, understated sense of fairness and humour.”

It’s pretty good as far as it goes, even if it doesn’t reflect aspects of British life (complaining about the government, asylum seekers, taxes, potholes, trains, the cost of living, and the weather) that are more contemporary and relevant. But there is a great deal more to us than any large language model could crunch into a paragraph’s précis. We are a polyglot nation, for sure, diverse and eclectic, difficult to characterise. Four nations in on

See Full Page