Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies is a 1990 book by Christopher Hitchens which aims to examine the so-called "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain, with a focus especially on the 20th century. It was reissued in 2004 as Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship, with a new preface by the author. The book is not and does not purport to be a history of the relationship; it is rather, as Hitchens describes it, a series of "incisions, made at selected crucial points." The book is dedicated to the author's wife, Carol Blue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_Class,_and_Nostalgia:_Anglo-American_Ironies British--American relations encompass many complex relations over the span of four centuries, beginning in 1607 with England's first permanent colony in North America called Jamestown, to the present day, between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America. The two nations are bound together by shared history, an overlap in religion and a common language and legal system, and kinship ties that reach back hundreds of years, including kindred, ancestral lines among English Americans, Scottish Americans, Welsh Americans, and Scotch-Irish Americans. Through times of war and rebellion, peace and estrangement, as well as becoming friends and allies, the UK and the USA cemented these deeply rooted links during World War II into what is known as the "Special Relationship", described in 2009 by British political commentator Christiane Amanpour as "the key trans-Atlantic alliance", which the U.S. Senate Chair on European Affairs acknowledged in 2010 as "one of the cornerstones of stability around the world." Today, the relationship with the United States represents the "most important bilateral partnership" in current British foreign policy, and the American foreign policy affirms its relationship with the United Kingdom as its most important bilateral relationship, as evidenced in aligned political affairs, mutual cooperation in the areas of trade, commerce, finance, technology, academics, as well as the arts and sciences; the sharing of government and military intelligence, and joint combat operations and peacekeeping missions carried out between the United States Armed Forces and the British Armed Forces. The UK has always been the biggest foreign investor in the USA and vice versa. The two countries combined make up a huge percentage of world trade, a significant impact of the cultures of many other countries and territories, and are the largest economies and the most populous nodes of the Anglosphere, with a combined population of over 370 million as of 2010. Together, they have given the English language a dominant role in many sectors of the modern world. There is a maritime boundary between the British dependent territories of the British Virgin Islands and Anguilla, and the United States' dependent territories of the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. According to a 2013 BBC World Service Poll, 74% of Americans view the United Kingdom positively, with only 14% expressing a negative view. However, British views of the U.S. are much more sharply divided, with 46% viewing the U.S. positively and 46% viewing the U.S. negatively. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom%E2%80%93United_States_relations

• published: 31 Mar 2014
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