Having founded his whole book on a mistake, Hemming cannot put a foot right, and assumes that everyday victims of drug-taking who have grown obsessive and paranoid are Eccentrics. England could well do without such eccentrics.

However, in a blokey jokey sweary sort of way, Party One of the book is not too bad, in a radio deejay style. Read aloud at night on the wireless, it might send you to sleep smiling. Hemming even brings in two aristocrats, the Marquessof Bath (who turns out to have taken L.S.D. just like any dreary suburban art student) and a Shropshire squire who believes in cruelty to animals (his version of being “politically incorrect” like everyone else). Most Hemming eccentrics are intensely selfish and leave the world a far worse place than when they found it.

In Parts Two, Three and Four, to the end, the book deteriorates and ceases to be radio-like. Hemming tries to form serious conclusions from his parade of wretches, with much pontification on the Spirit of England, English Identityand Eccentricity and the English. Older books on England, from the eighteen nineties to the nineteen forties, always headed the chapter on the Spirit of England with a photograph of a horse with a white blaze on its forehead pulling a plough held by a man in a cloth cap. I remember such scenes in real life, but the last time I met a ploughman, in Lincolnshire, he drove a tractor and wore a baseball cap. Some farmers here and there still work with horses - could not Hemming have sought them out, instead of giving us tattooed madmen and brothel keepers?