How British

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29264, 23 July 1960, Page 3

How British

Can You Be? LA Fourth Leader in “The Times”]

The other day an advertiser in the Agony Column described himself as “British to the core.” This sturdy claim has an old-fashioned ring. Keen patriots of other nations doubtless employ similar phrases to describe themselves, but we, though we apply the epithet “typical” to at least 80 per cent, of the foreigners we meet, are never heard to say that one of them is (for instance) “Chinese to the core.” Perhaps aliens, through some regrettable organic deficiency, do not possess cores. This does not, however, seem likely. The dictionary says that a core is “the inner part of anything, esp. of fruit.” Even the least worthy, even the puniest, foreigner must have an inner part, and indeed (now one comes to think of it) the conception of lesser breeds without the core is invalidated by the frequency with which, in fiction at any rate, they turn out to be rotten to it.

But the more one ponders these figures of speech the more confused one becomes. A man can be an artist to his fingertips; why, if he had chosen another career, could he never have become a stockbroker to his fingertips? Why, if one can be broke to the wide and dead to the world, can one not be broke to the world and dead to the wide? If loyal to a fault, why not fat to a fault? In the whole of this obscure field only one assumption can be safely made. You can be British to the core, or you can be rotten to the lore; you cannot possibly be both. >