English identity is beset by confusion and ambiguity. The first English saint for 48 years himself influenced the developing conversation about the nature of our national identity

English identity is beset by confusion and ambiguity. The first English saint for 48 years himself influenced the developing conversation about the nature of our national identity

A few years back, I was attending an academic conference and heard someone commenting that English people always seem to begin their conference papers with an apology. I’ve caught myself doing it many times – apologising for being a relative amateur on the subject in question, or having arrived late and therefore being unable to link what I’m saying with the paper before mine, and so on. The social anthropologist Kate Fox has observed that the English have a marked “sorry-reflex”: in other words, they use the word “sorry” far more frequently than other nationalities.

I once apologised before giving a paper on John Henry Newman’s Apologia. People might be forgiven for saying the title of Newman’s literary masterpiece is peculiarly English. But the word apologia doesn’t actually mean an “apology”, but a “defence”. Perhaps the sorry-reflex is a complex, counter-intuitive form of defence. This is very strange indeed, considering that the word “sorry” originates from the Old English word sarig, meaning “distressed, grieved or full of sorrow”.

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