The social contract has changed for ever: whether between government & individual capitalists, start-ups & corporates, or men
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What do the English think? Every country has a dominant set of beliefs & attitudes concerning everything from how to live a good life, how we should organize society, & the roles of the sexes. Yet despite many attempts to define our national character, what might be called the nation's philosophy has remained largely unexamined until now. Philosopher Julian Baggini pinpointed postcode S66 on the outskirts of Rotherham as England in microcosm
- an area that reflected most accurately the full range of the nation's inhabitants, its most typical mix of urban & rural, old & young, married & single. He then spent six months living there, immersing himself in this typical English Everytown, in order to get to know the mind of a people. It sees the world as full of patterns & order, a view manifest in its enjoyment of gambling. It has a functional, puritanical streak, evident in its notoriously bad cuisine. In the English mind, men should be men & women should be women (but it's not sure what children should be). Baggini's account of the English is both a portrait of its people & a personal story about being an alien in your own l&. Sympathetic but critical, serious yet witty, Welcome to Everytown shows a country in which the familiar becomes strange, & the strange familiar.