In order to be absolutely truthful, I should have to trac...

In order to be absolutely truthful, I should have to track down every needless humiliation I was offered in England, and relieve it in my memory for the torture it was; and then seek out every instance of sensitivity with which someone sought to save me from humiliation; hold them together, weight them up, and have them cancel one another out, as happened to me.

One could write a book about English parties. I never got used to them. They strike me as senseless and heartless, every bit in keeping with such cold people. The idea, after all, is not to get too close. A s soon as a conversation was developing (which wasn’t an easy thing to bring about), it was time to push off and turn to somebody else. It was not done to spend too long with one person, that was accounted selfish. People were there to make rapid contact, and, still more, rapid withdrawals. Sometimes you wouldn’t even know who you had been talking to. Those were the ideal cases in these ritualised celebrations of non-contact.

During the War, more than fifty years ago now, it was England’s salvation that it was an island. It was still an island, and that asset, a colossal advantage, has been frittered away. Today, it is what’s left over from a government whose one and only prescription for everything was selfishness. People felt proud of this fact, as though it were some kind of revelation, a horde of men (and women) in pinstripes swarmed over the land, calling themselves businessmen or executives, and sought to plunder the country, just as one the country had sought to plunder the rest of the world. England decided it would loot itself, and engaged an army of yuppies for that end. 

Canetti, Party in the Blitz