the likes of us

Michael Collins: 'The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class'. 

Granta Books. 2004

Not finished this yet, but very much enjoying it. More to write about it but in the meantime parts relating to the middle and upper-class fascination with proletariat life (and revolutionary communism) and with the emerging fascist blackshirts in the late 1930s reveal something (hopeful) of the English temperament:

"When Mosley's blackshirts marched to the Elephant & Castle and into Bermondsey in 1937 singing 'the Horst Wessel Lied' and the hymn of Mussolini's fascist party, they were confronted by communists singing 'The Red Flag'. But all these voices were drowned out by the collective renditions of 'Rule Britannia' and 'Land of Hope and Glory' from the majority of those living nearby who had turned out on the streets, or witnessed the events from windows and balconies." (p.123)