Hélène von Bismarck twice quotes (in an officiously corrected version) Robert Burns’s lines: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ She is congratulating herself on assuming this role in writing a book about Britain as a German. There is no doubt that out of a mixture of self-regard, curiosity about other people’s points of view and the occasional outburst of ribald mockery, the British have long enjoyed accounts of themselves by visitors. Whether these narratives possess any accuracy or unusual perception is another question, but there seems no doubt that a British audience exists even for ones of the utmost mediocrity and banality.
Fantastic Kingdom is a book that reveals much about the prejudices and unquestioned assumptions of a particular class of person. Bismarck – she is not a descendant of Otto, but I dare say the name has been helpful to her career – is virulently in favour of the European Union and rather given to scolding Britain for pursuing a contrary path. She takes for granted that those who were sceptical about the EU were culturally detached from Europe. This is nonsense, although it suits European propagandists that any British person unenthusiastic about the professional standards of Jean-Claude Juncker, Sabine Weyand and that Belgian answer to Sir Anthony Beaumont-Dark, Guy Verhofstadt, must also detest Beethoven, post-Impressionism, taleggio, the tower villages of the southern Peloponnese and any word of a foreign language.
