Matless David. About England

Reaktion Books, 2023. — 360 p. — ISBN 978 1 78914 691 2When I was young, the daily regional commercial television news programme was called About Anglia. Th e ‘Anglia’ part referred both to Anglia Television, the regional itv company, and to the region covered, East Anglia. Anglia, the medieval Latin name for England, migrated to the television age, and About Anglia ran daily on week-days between 1960 and 1990, against its bbc rival Look East. Th e title captured both its regional subject-matter, as a programme about East Anglia, and its mode of operation, with outside broadcasts going about Anglia in search of stories.
Surfacing decades on, this multivalent childhood memory may have shaped the title of this book. About England examines the England of the late twentieth and early twenty-f i rst centuries in various ways:
by attending to commentary ‘About England’, whereby people have sought to say something about a country, even claiming to speak for it; by going ‘About England’, to sites deemed to say something about the country, whether from symbolically standing out of the ordinary or by being symbolic in their ordinariness; in fi nding estimates ‘About England’, approximations of something hard to pin down, elusive in its meaning, with, for some, Englishness marked out as being never quite def i nable; and in fi nding a country ‘going about’, as if a yacht sailing, either changing a planned course or tacking back and forth to continue in an intended direction, steadily buf f eted, negotiating wind.
About England pursues commentary, journey, estimate and manoeuvre over six decades, to open up English questions, and to show how English identity has been asserted, pondered, challenged, parodied, even made preposterous, in a country of contested variety.About England navigates the country through thematic chapters investigating the past six decades. Questions of landscape, place and geography, and of time, history and heritage, run throughout. About England largely sidesteps issues of agriculture, nature and spirituality, which will be addressed in a companion volume, England’s Green. Th e book is divided into three parts, including seven chapters following this introduction, before a short conclusion ref l ects back across the book.