" Before it was necessary for foreign visitors to reverence the British Empire, one visitor after another commented on the remarkable vanity of the English. In 1497, a Venetian noticed that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say “he looks like an Englishman” and that “it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman "

― Jeremy Paxman , The English: A Portrait of a People