Kate watches the English tribes -fancy a glimpse?

BIT # 1

Kate Fox tells how awkwardness and hypocrisy rule a nation in Watching the English. 

 if you aren't English you'll finally understand all their peculiar little ways. 

PART ONE: CONVERSATION CODES

•  The Weather 
• Grooming-talk 
• Humour Rules 
• Linguistic Class Codes 
• Emerging Talk-rules: The Mobile Phone 
• Pub-talk

PART TWO: BEHAVIOUR CODES

• Home Rules 
• Rules of the Road 
• Work to Rule 
• Rules of Play 
• Dress Codes Food 
• Rules Rules of Sex 
• Rites of Passage

Kate Fox, the social anthropologist who put the quirks and hidden conditions of the English under a microscope, visits 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. An international bestseller, Watching the English is both an incisive and hilarious look at the English and their society.

BIT # 2

Round off.

Study the product at AMAZON, thenRead the comments to her book at Amazon's webpageWrite a comment on what you understood

BIT # 3

Catherine Bennett isn't so sure

Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
by Kate Fox
424pp, Hodder, £20 -The GUARDIAN -REVIEW

• It was quite a consolation to finish Kate Fox's analysis of Englishness in the departure lounge of Heraklion airport, where a few hundred English people were unselfconsciously squabbling and cursing and barging into one another. For Fox says we are not like that at all. "Social dis-ease", she decides, is the "central core of Englishness". She holds this congenital awkwardness responsible for everything from our "obsession with privacy" to our celebrated courtesy, famous reserve and infinite capacity for embarrassment. "We do everything in moderation," she believes.

• Fox's curiosity about English behaviour, which she attempts to reduce, in this prodigously long investigation, into key constituent parts, is matched only by her regret that we are not a more free and easy nationality. (...) We are, in fact, "the most repressed and inhibited people on earth". 

• Since Fox is a leading social anthropologist, we must believe her when she tells us that our rites of passage also leave a good deal to be desired. It "seems a shame", she says, "that there is no special ritual to mark the completion of secondary education". Maybe we're too mean to pay for them. Contemplating the cautious attitudes of young English people towards work and money, Fox professes herself "disappointed" to find them planning for the future and "not much cheered" to discover an early aversion to being in debt. 

• Fox is happy to expose the working-class habit of saying things like "nuffink" and "serviette" along with other mannerisms. (...) Still, one day her exhaustive observations on these "hidden" rules may prove invaluable to visitors from another planet. 

• Fox has worked so hard to be charming and fun that she seems to lack the energy, or invention, that would be required to reconcile her theory of an inhibited and "dis-eased" nation with the evidence of increasingly unbuttoned, culturally diverse and unpredictable forms of Englishness. Or Europeanness. 

A good many of Fox's selected "English" traits - love of privacy, clubs, DIY and talking about the weather - seem remarkably similar to the French or German love of privacy, clubs, DIY and talking about the weather. 

Enjoy two reviews here:

• Dutton
• Susan