Voltaire's Coconuts, or Anglomania in Europe by Ian Buruma (Phoenix, £7.99 in UK)

Voltaire's Anglophilia is well known; his sojourn in London made him an admirer of British parliamentary rule, British trading acumen, British upper-middle-class life, British culture - even if he had reservations about Shakespeare. His views were highly influential, but war between the two nations created a gap which did not end until the milieu after Waterloo, when English clothes, English sang-froid, even English literature (chiefly Shakespeare and Byron) became a cult which lasted into the generation of Baudelaire. Anglomania in Germany was a more complex thing, in spite of royal intermarriage, and was liable to recoil quickly into suspicion and jealousy - as in the case of Kaiser Wilhelm. Ian Buruma, who is Dutch-born, writes as a man who knows Britain well but can stand outside the battle.