Contributers write about books which have enhanced their lives ... a book which made him think twice about what it means to be British.

Inside every Englishman, I suspect, there is an Italian trying to get out. This is the only explanation that I have found for our strange cocktail of self-control and passion. We are a nation of deep feelings, with a mistrust of introspection and little understanding of ourselves: the emotions of Princess Diana's funeral baffle us as much as the rest of the world. How many studies have you seen of English nationalism?

A dozen years ago Keith Clements, a British Baptist church minister and now secretary general of the European Conference of Churches, wrote a book that sheds a prophetic and theological light on the love of country. A patriotism for today has changed for ever the way I look at the two countries I call my own (I have dual nationality, British and Swiss). He examines Britain of the 1980s, but raises issues that are universal and timeless.

`For the English,' he notes, `Britain is essentially England, with the Celtic communities attached somewhere on the fringe. That they are attached at all is a fact for which they should be more grateful than they often are, in the English view.' Englishness supplies the norm for political, social and cultural life. This equation of an assumed English dominance With British identity has been increasingly challenged by Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and by events in Northern Ireland.

In many western European countries, recent years have seen the rise of a strident, nationalist, populist right. Clements attacks the identity that is defined only in terms of enemies, of what it is not (not black or brown, not Muslim ...) But he sees justified questions behind this phenomenon: `Who are we? What is this nation?' And he attacks the prudery of Christians who fear that any talk of love of nation indicates an incipient fascism. He seeks a third path, between a right-wing patriotism and a rootless left-wing internationalism.

Until we know more of what it means to love our country, he maintains, we shall not be able to engage effectively with many of our social and political problems. `We need a love which comprises both passion and clarity,' he writes. `Passion without clarity breeds not real love, but infatuation. Clarity without passion produces mere acquaintance, observation, analysis. We need to find our way to a love which can be both affectionate and critical, devoted and honest, avoiding equally cynical indifference to our future and the fantasies of archaic, imperialistic or racist patriotism.' He quotes the famous hymn I vow to thee, my country which speaks of `the love that asks no question: the love that stands the test'. True patriotism, for him, has many questions it has to ask.

Clements draws on his considerable knowledge of the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran martyr in the struggle against Hitler. Bonhoeffer loved his country passionately, but denounced the evil he saw, returning to Germany just before the outbreak of war to share his people's fate. Clements quotes Bonhoeffer: `God loves man. God loves the world. It is not an ideal man that he loves, but man as he is; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find abominable in man's opposition to God, what we shrink from in pain and hostility, the real man, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love, and it is with this that he unites himself utterly.'

Thus, writes Clements, love of country must be clear-eyed and realistic--not a wishful, indulgent admiration of what once might have been but no longer exists, or of what one would like to be but quite simply is not. It is the real country we must love.

In face of a confusing and disappointing present and an unimaginable future, the past seems solid and secure in its achievements. Perhaps this explains what Clements--and he is not alone in this--sees as our obsession with World War II. Clements sees `the Falklands episode' as `a re-run of D-Day', rather than an encounter with the global realities of the 1980s.

What matters now is how the story of the past is handed on. `Whenever, in retelling the story of the past, the guilt of former days is not recognized, it becomes contemporary again,' he believes. Superficial patriotism fears the admission of guilt because from the ordinary, human perspective, it can only lead to inner defeat and despair. But the moment one accepts one's guilt can also be the moment of grace and forgiveness. What appears to be death, is a moment of new life. Reality is faced, the world as it actually is can be accepted, and new energies released.

The past makes no sense without faith. Bonhoeffer felt that the rejection of Christianity in the West was bringing about a nihilistic rush to the `void', engulfing `life, history, family, nation, language, faith'.

Britain today badly needs a public education in the realities of the world in which it is living. The empire may have gone, the atlases may have been re-coloured and renamed, but it is still an imperialist picture which dominates popular attitudes: the world exists for Britain's benefit, or, if it cannot be made to work that way, to be ignored. Britain has an almost obsessive desire to be admired by other countries, but only rarely does she ask what people would admire her for.

In his final chapter, Clements diagnoses a disorder in British self-awareness and self-esteem. Britain is like a man `who is not only unsure of who he is and who he is meant to be, but ... perhaps even afraid of finding out; someone unwilling to take responsibility for himself in the real world of here and now, preferring to dream of the life he once enjoyed, or thinks he enjoyed; someone unable to accept himself as he is and the world as it is.'

The old patriotic language and symbolism no longer fit the reality, but instead of a search for a new meaning to patriotism, with a new language and symbolism, there is a half-hearted retention of the old. `A true catalogue of Britain must do justice to the beauty and the grimness, the growth and the decay, the peace and the discontent. A true loyalty to Britain will neither pretend to be unmoved by the good and the lovely, nor will it flinch from the depressing and disturbing side of the picture.' Responsibility towards history means `the carrying forward of a story, the plot of which has already been part-written, and in which one is now part-author, part-actor. To make sense, one's own writing and acting must have recognizable continuity with what has gone before.'

True patriotism involves looking to the continuation for the story for the next generation. The British story is a complex and many-textured drama, and we have to decide which themes are the most significant, if she is not to become an island museum. Clements concludes in the faith that `One day, if sufficient people tread this way, the new words and tunes and images will come.' For the present, he invites us to keep on walking.

(*) `A patriotism for today--love of country in dialogue with the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer' by Keith W Clements (Collins, London 1986).