Imagine you’re a Briton spending a few years in America, starting somewhere around the beginning of 2003. Two years removed from the 9/11 attacks, and a few months shy of the invasion of Iraq, how did America look to an outsider? “I have always found America exciting; but, for better or worse, never exceptional. Its efforts at global domination seemed like a plot development in the narrative of European empire rather than a break from it… The fact that it is a big country, which, like any complicated and interesting place, is full of contradictions, is axiomatic. But it is rare to see a political culture and counter-culture so enmeshed, confused and evenly balanced (in numerical terms, at least) that it is impossible to tell which is which.”