You may have heard it said that actor Hugh Grant is the quintessential Englishman. Polite and reserved, slightly foppish, unsure of himself, self-deprecating, good-natured ... and pretty useless.
With that bumbling Four Weddings and a Funeral style of socially shooting oneself in the foot, he seems to sum up much of the English character.
But this culture, from which much of the west takes its core notions of civility, is far more complex and just as capable of exhibiting extreme violence and anti-social behaviour.
Trying to get to the bottom of it in her new book, Watching the English, is social anthropologist Kate Fox, a girlish 42-year-old who speaks enthusiastically about her three years researching and writing this study of English manners. Only recently married, the Cambridge-educated blonde gives the impression of being more than a touch eccentric and herself a late bloomer socially.
'Jumping ahead of people in queues to gauge their reaction was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do,' she says. 'A lot of the research turned out to be tests of my own Englishness. For the English, queue-jumping is a deadly sin, which it isn't in other cultures,' she says. 'At the same time, that makes it easier because we're so reticent and unassertive. If you're English a raised eyebrow is a sort of stab to the heart.
'Most stereotypes are based on at least a grain of truth. They don't just come out of thin air. There are reasons people talk about English reserve.