Speaking of distractions: Imagine a very long work of fiction published five hundred years in the future chronicling the turbulent career of the current American president, told from the point of view of one of his fixers-say, Michael Cohen. Prince Andrew’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein the soft exit of Prince Harry and his American wife, Meghan Markle, from public life the revelation that Charles and Diana’s confidant and sometime marriage counselor Jimmy Savile was a serial pedophile-these scandals and contretemps only promise to become the fodder for ever more books and scripts about a once powerful family that is now merely a powerful distraction. If the royal family, history’s walking hangover, were abolished tomorrow, would cultural production chronicling the foibles of the English monarchy cease, or even slow down? The prospect is unlikely. “If you liked football, you would be happier.” Perhaps I’d also be happier if I were inclined to take an interest in princes and princesses, living or dead. “Many of us don’t care about them at all.” Such was my disanglophilia, a failure to love English things and to love Englishness. “Americans care more about the royal family than the British do,” another American expatriate friend of mine once remarked shortly after I’d arrived in London. The Windsors are subsidized at a rate of £82 million a year, or £1.24 per British citizen, an amount it’s said they more than make up for by contributing to the economy as human tourist attractions, not to mention as mascots for various charitable causes. Paul’s, but none of this energy had been directed at the royal family. One Thanksgiving during the four years I was a resident of London, at a dinner of Americans and French people, one of the Yanks at the table remarked that if she were a member of the English working class, she “would be throwing Molotov cocktails on the King’s Road and torching Buckingham Palace.” There had been riots in London the year before, student protests were a constant, and the previous autumn had seen the occupation of St.
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