KATE FOX

In this completely revised and updated edition of international bestseller WATCHING THE ENGLISH, anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the quirks, habits and foibles of the English people. Now with new survey data to add weight to her original fieldwork findings, and more extensive field-research and experiments to back up earlier observations, Kate Fox has deciphered yet more enigmatic behaviour codes, adding new rules, new subcultures, new chapters and over 100 updates. If you're English, this new edition of Kate Fox's acclaimed international bestseller will make you stand back and re-examine everything you take for granted - and if you aren't English you'll finally understand all our peculiar little ways. WATCHING THE ENGLISH has sold more than half a million copies and has been translated into many languages. Not only a worldwide bestseller, but also a set text for university anthropology courses, WATCHING THE ENGLISH has been widely praised as a revealing and entertaining dissection of the English national character.

John Barlow, a self-confessed glutton, finds himself in a meat-lover's dream in northern Spain. Galicia, the misty-green north-west corner, reveres and consumes every part of the pig. This starts Barlow thinking about the nature of our relationship with food - what's delicious, what's nasty and what sort of obligation we have to the animals we eat. Over the course of one glorious, bilious year, Barlow tries the patience of his vegetarian wife as he goes the whole hog and vows to eat everything but the squeal, from cocido in a cantina to a chorizo feast at Carnival, from ribs to roast ham, all washed down with local wine - delicious!

Ten years later, they're still talking about the weather! Kate Fox, the social anthropologist who put the quirks and hidden conditions of the English under a microscope, is back with more biting insights about the nature of Englishness. This updated and revised edition of Watching the English--which over the last decade has become the unofficial guidebook to the English national character--features new and fresh insights on the unwritten rules and foibles of "squaddies," bikers, horse-riders, and more. Fox revisits a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behavior. She demystifies the peculiar cultural rules that baffle us: the rules of weather-speak. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid pantomime rule. Class anxiety tests. The roots of English self-mockery and many more. An international bestseller, Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful and often hilarious look at the English and their society.

A celebration of the tree we lost and those to comeFrom poet Kate Fox comes a book for everyone who knew the famous silhouette of the tree that stood at Sycamore Gap For those who took shelter saw its branches against the sky or heard the leaves dance for all the picnics next to it and the proposals under it For anyone who feels the strength of silent roots and the quiet promise of the turning year For any of us who measure time in rings and wait for green leaves to grow again For everyone who felt a loss when the gap was just a gap once more these are words that grew in the space the hope that shoots like seedlings Grown against the wide sky of Northumbria at a place of borders where ancient history meets our modern lives the tree that stood for so long still has much to say This is a book of growth loss and renewal a song from soil to soul about how we all live where the earth meets the sky

Click the Extracts tab above to read our exclusive interview with Kate Fox, plus sample poems from the book.Fox Populi takes poetry on a hilarious, Creature Comforts-style journey through the crackly airwaves of contemporary culture. Radio-mic in hand, Kate Fox listens in on comedians and psychiatrists, Great North runners and nutters, and the staff of a call centre in modern-day Tynemouth. Herself a familiar voice on BBC TV and radio, this first full-length collection confirms Kate Foxs position as one of the UKs most popular poet-comedians."Funny, quirky and a wonderful writer." Sarah Millican, stand-up comedian"Self deprecating and wry throughout, this is poetry that is both accessible, true and wise."The Crack"Sylvia Plath channelling Victoria Wood" Matt HarveyKate Fox is a poet, performer and comedian. Born in Bradford in 1975, she is the Poet in Residence on BBC Radio 4s Saturday Live. She has been the Poet in Residence for the BBC2 coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, and for the Great North Run in 2011 and 2012. Her poems have been broadcast on the BBC2 Daily Politics show, BBC Online, Amnesty International and Radio 3s The Verb with Ian McMillan. Her one-woman Edinburgh Festival show, Kate Fox News, toured the UK in 2010-11 (4 stars, Sunday Telegraph). She has also appeared at several other major festivals including Latitude, Aldeburgh and Cheltenham. Her poems recently appeared in The Iron Book of Humorous Verse (Iron Press, 2010). She lives in Thirsk, and writes a weekly column for The Journal newspaper in Newcastle.This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here.

Kate Foxs new collectionThe Oscillations explores distance and isolation in the age of the pandemic, refracted through the lenses of neurodiversity and trauma in poems that are bold, often frank and funny. Dazzling and open-hearted poems of self-discovery.Responding to a world that has been broken by the pandemic into a before and after. A strong voice sings of what it means to be many things at once - autistic, creative, northern, a woman. Fox measures not only distances, social or otherwise, but how we breach them, and what the view might be from beyond them.Its both comforting and challenging to have Kate Fox as our guide through these turbulent and fractured times; comforting because Kates language is always inclusive and accessible and challenging because the ideas her superb poems brim with ask us to look deeply inside ourselves." - Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster