Cricket and cucumber sandwiches in Hollywood come to mind, with an English actor like David Niven (in his autobiography The Moon’s a Balloon, 1972) left wondering why he is able to find work with not much talent to draw on besides a cute accent. Or the life, death, traveling exhibits and collectibles of Diana Windsor, part of a surrogate royal family for Americans, who, like the Peter Sellars character in Being There (1979), just like to watch.

But the English in America have not merely been aristocrats, and their country is more than fodder for public broadcasting, like Masterpiece Theater, in which England is portrayed as fundamentally white with rather quaint and even charming ideas about class divisions. Americans often respond viscerally to such television fare. Indeed, the Republican Party’s assault on public broadcasting has had some genealogical connection with the old mid-western populist and middle-American suspicion of things British.

The United States has had a love—hate relationship with the country from which it sprung in revolution and from which many claim descent, and the English in America have needed to learn the nature of this relationship as they endeavor to exploit the country to their full advantage. The hate part is clearly understood—revolution is a source of powerful animus indeed. Additionally the largest immigrant groups in the United States were the descendants of Irish and Germans, the former linked to anticolonial nationalism and the latter from a nation that contested European sovereignty Later, immigrants from British colonies—South Asia, the Caribbean, Hong Kong—also have ambivalent feelings towards the English.

Love came from sharing constitutional ideas with the British, and from fighting alongside them in two world wars (though the first one saw Americans shedding their blood in defense of the British Empire in the most unpopular war ever fought by the US).

Since the Second World War, and certainly since the Suez crisis, Britain has been a junior partner, a base for American planes and cruise missiles. Americans have felt fairly comfortable envisioning Britain as a former empire, seeing themselves as the inheritors of British global dominance. Hence Americans could buy London Bridge and rebuild it in the middle of a desert (even if it turned out to be the wrong bridge). And if a Margaret Thatcher was still a potent enough force to motivate a wimpy president to go to war with a tin-pot dictator, so much the better.

But wealthy English speculators, under the cloak of their irrelevance, also sneaked into the United States during the 1980s to buy up major parts of American real estate— newspapers, companies, banks. While Americans were anxiously eyeing the Japanese and Germans, the English undertook far larger transactions of their own. Indeed, Thatcher’s virtually bankrupt Britain became a profitable haven for privateers who could play on the markets across the ocean.

But perhaps “the Brits” felt that this was merely payment for the debt the United States owed them in the realm of popular music and culture. Apart from highbrow television, the English invasion was most noticeable from the mid-1960s to the present in wave after wave of innovative music. Beginning with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, following through the psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd and Yes, through singer/songwriters as diverse as David Bowie (who became closely involved with artists producing the Philadelphia sound), Elton John and Joan Armatrading, and continuing with a dissonant crash with the punk excesses of the Sex Pistols, the English contribution to American music has been profound, in many instances fitting within the process of co-opting and commercializing African American music. The success of Mike Myers’ spoof on 1960s Britain in the “Austin Powers” movies pays tribute, in a rather warped way to this legacy The excesses of Thatcher and Reagan have given way to the centrists Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The old partnership of the 1950s has been revived, with Blair coming to the support of Clinton at every available opportunity and Clinton returning the favor whenever this might be of use to the prime minister.

Moreover, the old 1890s liaison—the “cute accent” gets the “All-American girl”—has returned as a match too. The hugely successful Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) established a template for the Anglo-American, all-white lovefest. This was then repeated in James Cameron’s (1997) remake of “Love Boat”, with a sinking feeling, followed by The Parent Trap remake (1998), in which it was shown that Americans and English truly were very rich twins divided at birth. The love affair has been reprised once again in the whitest Notting Hill (1999) ever captured on camera. Of course, this celebration of Anglo-American hegemony forgets one important fact: the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank.