Like so much that holds sway over our conflicted sense of who we are, and who others are, national identities are subject to imagination and interpellation. Which is not to say they are illusory; merely that they are elusive, constructed, indefinable and contested. However, both of these books make abundantly clear that, while we may have a strong sense of national identity in common with people we will never meet, that shared identity provides a powerful source of emotional as well as imaginative investment.

Vron Ware and Chris Rojek approach the question of contemporary Britishness from very different directions. One turns to personal testimonies and individual narratives, the other to collective identity and the accumulated myths of the nation. It is Ware's both that most strongly engages the emotions alongside the intellect as she meets, interviews, and listens to disparate people whose relationship to Britishness is at worst attenuated and at best hyphenated, but always engaged, involved, and above all lived as well as imagined. The book is a fascinating snapshot of contemporary glocal opinion, though it does also have its frustrations. After each anecdote, instead of concluding with a summation or analyzing the issue under scrutiny, Ware throws up more questions and moves on to her next example or encounter. The book thus walks around its titular, rhetorical enquiry, unsure whether it is a question at all, or whether it is merely a dismissive statement, while knowing it is probably both. Answers are implied more than they are formulated, providing the reader with a rich cultural historian's seam of current perspectives, opinions, and experiences.

Readers are implicitly invited to think through the narratives and viewpoints for themselves, reaching their own conclusions, because the questions at the heart of the book are broader than the title suggests. Ware is really interested in the cultural dynamics and political allegiances behind group identity, acutely aware that these are obviously not just “British questions,” such that she sees little use in trying to pinpoint Britishness. The question of who has an investment in the definition of Britishness, or its uses, is of more moment, and this is a globalized question in a postcolonial world. Such concerns fit well with the book's commissioning by the British Council, and its foreword by Neil Kinnock, ex-leader of the Labour Party, UK Commissioner to Europe, and now chair of the Council, who asked Ware to speak with young people in the United Kingdom, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya, Ireland, and Poland about Britishness in the context of its project on New National Identities. The resulting study provides a different take on Britishness from most previous attempts at a vox pop approach to national identity, by placing the question in a global context. Who Cares about Britishness? ultimately suggests that many people care, but far less for patriotic reasons than for historical, cultural, and political ones, because there are myriad kinds of Britishness framed by the people whose lives intersect with the places, institutions, communities, and practices of the United Kingdom. Importantly, Ware's book includes passages of reflection, not just on her own attitudes to national identity but on her experiences while writing the book. Passages begin with reflections on her circumstances of travel, or start by introducing someone whose story we are about to hear. As such, following in the footsteps of many a popular documentary or social enquiry, Who Cares about Britishness? is now most reminiscent of a scholarly travelogue, emerging as a cross between a television exploration of identity like Michael Palin's New Europe series and a national investigation using the format of TV shows such as the BBC's exercise in genealogy, Who Do You Think You Are?—a phrase if not a series that has helped to inspire Chris Rojek's subtitle.

In Brit-Myth, Rojek offers a deeply contrasting book on a broadly similar subject. Many passages, and much of the first half of the book, present a familiar rehash of recent events, historical touchstones, ancient myths, and modern facts about twenty-first-century Britain, combined with short analyses of key moments of national import and debate, such as the two Gulf Wars and the controversial sinking of the Belgrano in the Falklands conflict, in terms of myths of intention and “spin.” These are well-made and well-covered synopses, but the rest of the book tenders more of a satisfying exploration of traits and stereotypes that examines the possible provenances and contemporary currencies of global Britishness—though it ultimately stop short of providing the “new language” Rojek requires, but that Ware's book provides a basis for considering. Rojek has no truck with discussions of English character(istics), seeing books by Gill (The Angry Island [2005]) and Fox (The English [2004]) as disquisitions on Britishness even though they claim only to concern the English. This is because he believes “the English” are no more of a coherent group than are “the British”—which is all very well but the extended discussions of traits like repression and ressentiment focus on English traditional concerns, missing the flavor of the other three nations, as well as the hyphenated Britishness of today sketched by Ware's book.

As such, Rojek's book is clearly most concerned with stories and is perhaps a narratologist's approach to the “facts, half-truths, folk impressions, distortions, and falsehoods” that shape myths of Britishness (81). Unlike Ware, Rojek provides no interviews or firsthand archival research, but considerably more theory and academic analysis, resulting in a similar amount of reflection yet few conclusions on the three major changes in national identity flagged up by Brit-Myth: globalization, multiculturalism, and multiethnicity. The closest the book comes is in its tenth chapter that again outlines the current state of affairs and then cites the themes and proposed strategies of the 2000 Runnymede Trust Parekh Report on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, such as reading the past as double-coded for both ex-colonized and ex-colonizer in a modern community of communities. Taken together these two books ultimately provide a rounded approach to contemporary British studies of national identity, with Rojek advocating policies of social and economic inclusion to prevent British ressentiment growing in all these many communities, and Ware's book seeming to agree, though its concern lies much more than Rojek's with the testimony of those communities themselves, whether from Britain or beyond.