“Many of us don’t care about them at all.” Such was my disanglophilia, a failure to love English things and to love Englishness. “Americans care more about the royal family than the British do,” another American expatriate friend of mine once remarked shortly after I’d arrived in London. The Windsors are subsidized at a rate of £82 million a year, or £1.24 per British citizen, an amount it’s said they more than make up for by contributing to the economy as human tourist attractions, not to mention as mascots for various charitable causes. Paul’s, but none of this energy had been directed at the royal family. One Thanksgiving during the four years I was a resident of London, at a dinner of Americans and French people, one of the Yanks at the table remarked that if she were a member of the English working class, she “would be throwing Molotov cocktails on the King’s Road and torching Buckingham Palace.” There had been riots in London the year before, student protests were a constant, and the previous autumn had seen the occupation of St.
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