During the course of reading Ian Buruma’s Anglomania, I left it lying on the kitchen table where a friend picked it up and looked it over. This friend is a writer in his late thirties, scion of an old and distinguished New England literary family, WASPS and Anglophiles all. “Anglomania?” he asked dismissively. “Who pays any attention to England any more?”

Who indeed? Not many people outside of England itself, which is one of the points made in this intelligent, funny, erudite history of Anglophilia—and Anglophobia— from Voltaire’s day to our own. Buruma, author of books on Germany and Japan and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for the Humanities, has special qualifications for telling this particular story. Although his father was Dutch and Buruma himself was raised in the Hague, his mother was English, a source of pride for the boy. “Through the late 1940s and 1950s, and even in the 1960s, the British were considered a superior breed in places like the Hague,” he writes; “to me, a visit to Holland by my grandparents felt like the arrival of messengers from a wider, more glamorous world.”

The patriotism of his grandparents, though, was far more than the arrogance of a master race, or the snobbery that has long been one of the less attractive faces of Anglophilia. Bernard and Win Schlesinger were both the children of German Jewish immigrants, and they fervently embraced the customs of the country that had given them asylum