You should always take care which dark alleys you walk down, for you never know where you might get mugged by the ambiguities of the Anglo-American relationship.
Take the alleys of Gotham City, for example. While Batman would like to keep his investigation scientific, his English butler Alfred delivers a potent dollop of old-world tradition, invoking Shakespeare on the supernatural and Arthur Conan Doyle on the laws of deduction, persuading the hero to pursue the ghost angle.
When the ritual to contain the aristocratic ghost calls for a dash of aristocratic blood, Alfred volunteers, for it turns out he is descended from the Duke of Devonshire. Their foolish theatrics included building a fence around a cuckoo and trying to drown an eel. The spooky corners of genre fiction have long proved meeting places of Anglo-American culture. Joshi, of asserting the supremacy of British spelling. More recently, Patrick McGrath, a British novelist who grew up on the grounds of Broadmoor, a high-security mental hospital in Berkshire where his father was superintendent, has carved out a niche of Anglo-American gothic Freudianism.
The gothic connection is hardly surprising. Although many of the antagonisms that beset the Anglo-American alliance have been half-forgotten, on the state-to-state level, Winston Churchill hoped the U. On the people-to-people level, U.
From , George Orwell recorded British jealousy over U. In the end, the couple are reunited on Earth, having proved their love. The final scenes, soaring above the great hall of heaven, filled with all the nations and peoples of the world or empire? General Assembly convened its first session. Comic books, as it happens, were also among the fault lines of the postwar Anglo-American relationship. They were a symbol, for some Brits at least, of American ascendancy and unwanted Americanization.
