Forever England

"These English are a pest.  Always poking their noses in where they are not wanted....This young man, Smith or whatever his name is...has nothing to gain....Yet he comes here, busying himself.  How is one to deal with such people?  They are without sense, when you offer to buy they will not sell, they are hard when you expect them to be soft, and soft when you think they will be hard, and somehow by accident, they have acquired an empire."

--Baffled Commendatore Marucci in The Murder of Eve (1945), by Moray Dalton