I can only speak for myself. Maybe it's because most of my ancestors were British, but I do feel deeply rooted here. I notice it when I watch foreign films or read foreign novels. It brings home to me the fact that I'm English-British. It isn't a question of loving or hating Britain. It's just what I am. Even if I decided to be a 'citizen of the world' and ditch the whole idea of national identity, that identity wouldn't ditch me. I don't have a choice. I can't escape.
When I watch The Godfather, for example, I'm very conscious that this isn't my culture. I not an Italian-American. I feel the same when I watch a Woody Allen film. Again, I'm not a Jewish-American, and this isn't my culture. I feel it even more keenly when it comes to literature. Take Wordsworth as an example. He couldn't have written those poems had he grown up in the tropics or the Australian outback. He might have written something just as good, but the feel or atmosphere or tone would have been different. His poetry is rooted the cool, damp, green landscape of a northern European island, as is the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Tennyson, Browning, Ted Hughes, Larkin – even T. S. Eliot. The same is true of so much British literature. When I read Jane Austen, Dickens, George Orwell, P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Hardy, etc, I feel the same warm glow of recognition. They are my writers, and they're writing about my land and my culture. More than anything, a culture is defined by its writers. And Britain is there in its literature – the rain, the humour, the irony, the wet sundays, the wars, the class system...the whole thing.