Karel Čapek

“ What an English gentleman is cannot be stated concisely; you would have to be acquainted, firstly, with an English club-waiter, or with a booking-clerk at a railway station, or, above all, with a policeman. A gentleman, that is a measured combination of silence, courtesy, dignity, sport, newspapers and honesty. The man sitting opposite you in the train will anger you for two hours by not regarding you as worthy of a glance ”

“ Their taciturnity is such that they do not even publicly abuse the Government, the trains or the taxes; on the whole, a joyless and reticent people. In the place of taverns, where one can sit, drink and talk, they have invented bars, where one can stand, drink and hold one’s peace. The more talkative people (like Lloyd George) take to politics, or to authorship; an English book must have at least four hundred pages.
It is perhaps through sheer taciturnity that the English swallow half of every word, and then the second half they somehow squash ”

“ IN England I should like to be a cow or a baby; but being a grown-up man I viewed the people of this country. Well, it is not true that the English wear loud check suits, with pipe and whiskers; as regards the latter, the only true Englishman is Dr. Bouček in Prague. Every Englishman wears a mackintosh, and has a cap on his head and a newspaper in his hand. As for the Englishwoman, she carries a mackintosh or a tennis racket. Nature here has a propensity for unusual shagginess, excrescences, woolliness, spikiness, and all kinds of hair ”