This week's New Yorker has Anthony Lane putting the latest Harry Potter against In the Loop and getting "a perplexing report on the corroded state of the British imagination." He says, "The choice appears to be between a soaring escape into fantasy, ... and a descent into the rat-run of moral contamination," before lamenting "So much denial and self-hatred, for a small country ... What hope is there for the return of the steady, tolerant gaze?"

The Brits I know are in no apparent state of denial nor self-hatred. In fact, so far from it: they are content, actualized, and happy. They seem so much less caught up with their self-images than many Americans I know; instead they live in their skins and get on with things. Unlike the stereotypes, they try new things, they are friendly, they make individual statements (both fashion and otherwise). But they're not obsessively driven, as is the American way, to set themselves off from the others, to be seen as unique and original. My favorite example is this: in Edinburgh we all lived—across the city—in nearly identical stone-built flats. We got interested in the small incidental variation from site to site, instead of installing pink flamingos and wearing baggy pants.

Do my British friends have a "steady, tolerant gaze"? Not in the Lawrence of Arabia sense, not that I saw. Then, I don't know my British friends as moral leaders. But perhaps they are closer to the sense of irony exemplified by In the Loop than to the escapist (?) fantasy of Harry Potter. It often seemed, in Edinburgh, there were things that everyone knew, and needn't be said, and these then were the basis of sly—but not cruel—jokes.

Anthony Lane knows something of Britain and something of films. Has he slightly over-egged the custard this time? Does he hang out with different folk than I do? Or must I admit that my muse, Criticism, has failed, that it cannot reliably take the pulse of a people?