Great starts

Loved the first paragraph from a recent article on English pubs in the Sunday Times...

Strange things have been happening to England. Still reeling from the dissolution of the empire in the years following World War II, now the English find they are not even British. As the cherished “United Kingdom” breaks into its constituent parts, Scots are clearly Scottish and the Welsh, Welsh. But who exactly are the English? What’s left of them, with everything but the southern half of their island taken away? Going back in time to trace roots doesn’t help. First came the Celts, then the Romans, then Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes. Invasion after invasion, until the Norman Conquest. English national identity only seemed to find its feet later, on the shifting sands of expansionism, from Elizabethan times onwards. The empire seemed to seal it. But now there’s just England, half of a green island in the northern seas, lashed by rain, scarred by two centuries of vicious industrialization fallen into dereliction, ruined, as D. H. Lawrence thought, by “the tragedy of ugliness,” its abominable architecture.