One day in the mid-1930s, a British diplomat, Allen Leeper, visited the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, at his home, the Bishop’s Palace. He was struck by a new volume sitting on a coffee table which sought to describe the character and condition of British society. Such books were not too unusual in these years, but this one was written not by a British author but a German. It was a new translation into English of a survey which had by then a long history of its own in Germany itself. The author, Wilhelm Dibelius, a professor at the University of Berlin, had visited Britain shortly after the end of the Great War with a view to studying a people whom he felt Germans had come to know only as an enemy. The fruit of this tour was soon published in 1922 and not called Britain, but England, even though the survey embraced Wales, Scotland and Ireland, if predominantly in the context of English understandings. The thorough Dibelius also added a chapter devoted to its empire and its view of the world at large.1