Jeremy Paxman, whose own Orwellian list of quintessential Englishnesses includes ‘quizzes and crosswords’, calls the English ‘a people obsessed by words’, and cites the phenomenal output of our publishing industry (150,000 new books a year, more per head than any other country), more newspapers per head than almost any other country, our ‘unstoppable flow of Letters to the Editor’, our ‘insatiable appetite’ for all forms of verbal games and puzzles, our thriving theatres and bookshops.
