Something remarkable has happened to the English perception of the land in which they live. [...] In the collective unconscious from which John Major drew his pictures, there exists another England. It is not the country in which the English actually live, but the place they imagine they are living in. It touches the reality they see around them at various points, but it is something ideal, like the 'other country' of Spring-Rice's patriotic hymn [...]. What has happened is that the English have become exiles from their own country.
Jeremy Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (1999), p. 144.
