An Englishman sums it up with the exclamation: 'Typical!' Besides 'Typical!' she lists 'Come off it!' as our national motto - used whenever anyone starts being too earnest.
In certain situations, normal inhibitions are relaxed. Pets, for example, your own or other people's, can be addressed with a shameless warmth of emotion that is unthinkable in courtship of a member of the opposite sex. Nowadays the internet chat room allows quite uninhibited contact (and fibbing) with strangers.
The taboo against money-talk, of which Fox makes much, forbids you to ask directly what someone earns or paid for their house, or to disclose such information about yourself.
But is this still so true? It conflicts with Anthony Sampson's finding in his new book, Who Runs This Place: 'The respect for wealth and money-making rather than professional or moral values,' he says, 'has been the most fundamental change in Britain.' If fat cats rule nowadays, what will happen to English reticence? It is unknown in America.
Fox concludes with a list of ten defining characteristics of the English. They hardly surprise us - after all, we are all anthropologists, compulsive people-watchers.
But she attempts to rationalise our reliance on irony, our moderationunderstatement, selfdeprecation, hypocritical politeness and horror of sounding pleased with ourselves as all springing from a central core.
She calls it our 'Social Dis-ease', which sounds rather nasty. She says it is 'our inability to engage in a straightforward fashion with other human beings' that leads to these manifestations of English uptightness.
There is truth in this, of course. Embarrassment is the key factor - we go to endless lengths to avoid it, either for ourselves or others. Yes, the resulting codes of reticence and irony baffle foreigners, but do we actually care?
Would we rather be upfront instead of uptight? Imagine sticking a hand out to strangers, crying 'Hi! I'm Kevin from Kidderminster, worth half-amillion, two wives, a BMW and a therapist'? Come off it, Kate!
It was a witty American poet, Ogden Nash, who wrote of us: 'Every Englishman knows one thing - that to be an Englishman is the Best Thing There Is.' Only, of course, being English, we wouldn't dream of saying so ourselves.
