Updated, with new research and over 100 revisions Ten years later, they're still talking about the weather! Kate Fox, the social anthropologist who put the quirks and hidden conditions of the English under a microscope, is back with more biting insights about the nature of Englishness. This updated and revised edition of Watching the English - which over the last decade has become the unofficial guidebook to the English national character - features new and fresh insights on the unwritten rules and foibles of "squaddies," bikers, horse-riders, and more. Fox revisits a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behavior. She demystifies the peculiar cultural rules that baffle us: the rules of weather-speak. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid pantomime rule. Class anxiety tests. The roots of English self-mockery and many more. An international bestseller, Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful and often hilarious look at the English and their society.

She helps people put their demons to rest. But she has a few of her own... In the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital, Dr. Nadine Lavoie is in her element. She has the tools to help people, and she has the desire—healing broken families is what she lives for. But Nadine doesn't want to look too closely at her own past because there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes. It takes all her willpower to tamp down her recurrent claustrophobia, and her daughter, Lisa, is a runaway who has been on the streets for seven years. When a distraught woman, Heather Simeon, is brought into the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit after a suicide attempt, Nadine gently coaxes her story out of her—and learns of some troubling parallels with her own life. Digging deeper, Nadine is forced to confront her traumatic childhood, and the damage that began when she and her brother were brought by their mother to a remote commune on Vancouver Island. What happened to Nadine? Why was their family destroyed? And why does the name Aaron Quinn, the group's leader, bring complex feelings of terror to Nadine even today? And then, the unthinkable happens, and Nadine realizes that danger is closer to home than she ever imagined. She has no choice but to face what terrifies her the most...and fight back. Sometimes you can leave the past, but you can never escape. Told with the trademark powerful storytelling that has had critics praising her work as "Gripping" (Kirkus), "Jaw-dropping" (Publishers Weekly) and "Crackling with suspense" (People magazine), ALWAYS WATCHING shows why Chevy Stevens is one of the most mesmerizing new talents of our day.

Jeremy Paxman is to many the embodiment of Englishness yet even he is sometimes forced to ask: who or what exactly are the English? And in setting about addressing this most vexing of questions, Paxman discovers answers to a few others. Like: � Why do the English actually enjoy feeling persecuted? � What is behind the English obsession with games? � How did they acquire their odd attitudes to sex and to food? � Where did they get their extraordinary capacity for hypocrisy? Covering history, attitudes to foreigners, sport, stereotypyes, language and much, much more, The English brims over with stories and anecdotes that provide a fascinating portrait of a nation and its people.

It is generally assumed that anthropologists do their research in remote and uncomfortable parts of the world--places with monsoons, mud huts, and malaria. In this volume, social anthropologist Kate Fox has taken on an altogether more enjoyable assignment, the study of the arcane world of British horseracing. For Fox, field research meant wandering around racetracks in a pink hat and high heels (standard tribal costume) rather than braving killer insects and primitive sanitation. Instead of an amorphous racing crowd, the author finds a complete subculture with its own distinctive customs, rituals, language and etiquette. Among the spectators, she identifies Horseys, Addicts, Anoraks, Pair-Bonders, Day-Outers, Suits, and Be-Seens--all united by remarkable friendliness and courtesy. Among the racing professionals, the tribal structure includes Warriors (jockeys), Shamans (trainers), Scribes (journalists), Elders (officials and stewards) and Sin-Eaters (bookies). Fox includes witty and incisive descriptions of the many strange ceremonies and rituals observed by racegoers--the Circuit Ritual, Ritual Conversations ("What do you fancy in the next?") , Celebration Rituals, the Catwalk Ritual, and Post-Mortem Rituals (naturally, a horse never loses a race because it's too slow)--and their special codes of behavior such as the Modesty Rule, the Collective Amnesia Rule, and the Code of Chivalry. The Racing Tribe is also a refreshingly candid account of anthropological fieldwork, including all the embarrassing mistakes, hiccups, short-cuts and guesswork that most social scientists keep very quiet about.

Here is an informative introduction to language: its origins in the past, its growth through history, and its present use for communication between peoples. It is at the same time a history of language, a guide to foreign tongues, and a method for learning them. It shows, through basic vocabularies, family resemblances of languages -- Teutonic, Romance, Greek -- helpful tricks of translation, key combinations of roots and phonetic patterns. It presents by common-sense methods the most helpful approach to the mastery of many languages; it condenses vocabulary to a minimum of essential words; it simplifies grammar in an entirely new way; and it teaches a language as it is actually used in everyday life.

'You see, if only they didn’t speak English in America, then we’d treat it as a foreign country – and probably understand it a lot better’ ‘the sanest man in America’ – Bill Bryson ‘Jon Sopel nails it’ – Emily Maitlis **With a brand new chapter, charting Trump's first year in power** As the BBC’s North America Editor, Jon Sopel has had a pretty busy time of it lately. In the time it’s taken for a reality star to go from laughing stock to leader of the free world, Jon has travelled the length and breadth of the United States, experiencing it from a perspective that most of us could only dream of: he has flown aboard Air Force One, interviewed President Obama and has even been described as ‘a beauty’ by none other than Donald Trump. Through music, film, literature, TV and even through the food we eat and the clothes that we wear we all have a highly developed sense of what America is and through our shared, tangled history we claim a special relationship. But America today feels about as alien a country as you could imagine. It is fearful, angry and impatient for change. In this fascinating, insightful portrait of American life and politics, Jon Sopel sets out to answer our questions about a country that once stood for the grandest of dreams, but which is now mired in a storm of political extremism, racial division and increasingly perverse beliefs.