“I don’t understand my own country any more,” I said to her. “In the history books, they tell us the English race has spread itself all over the dam world: gone and settled everywhere, and that’s one of the great, splendid English things. No one invited us, and we didn’t ask anyone’s permission, I suppose. Yet when a few hundred thousand come and settle among our fifty millions, we just can’t take it.”
Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners (1959)
