SOURCE: Britten, Daniel. “To England, with Love.” New Statesman 129, no. 4428 (19 March 1999): 45-6.

In the following review, Britten compliments Buruma's appealing writing in Voltaire's Coconuts, but finds the book lacking in serious analysis.

Why, asks Ian Buruma in [Voltaire's Coconuts,] his study of Anglophilia in Europe, has Britain “managed to achieve its peculiar equilibrium, based on a combination of social stability and inequality, of freedom and dull conformity, tolerance and provincial smugness, civility and greed”? The question presupposes that Britain actually achieved such a state of civility, since there have been and still are those who dismiss British liberty as a sham, not least certain Scots, Welsh and Irish people. Such dissenters argue that it is precisely because of its conformity and parochialism that England has maintained the illusion of liberty.

Buruma concentrates on those who have, for one reason or another, viewed Britain as a haven from the...