Robert Winder - Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain

Robert Winder has been literary editor of the Independent and deputy editor of Granta. He is a regular contributor to the Independent, the Observer and the New Statesman. He is also the author of Hell for Leather: A Modern Cricket Journey and two novels, No Admission and The Marriage of Time and Convenience.

Praise for Bloody Foreigners:

This is not only a timely and important book, but also one that is supremely readable, shot through with understated humour and irony The Times

A humane and sophisticated study that goes a long way towards defining what we are as a nation Independent

This is a topical, formidable and engaging book which will have and deserves to have many readers Robert Winder has tossed an elegant and compulsively warm-hearted grenade into a usually ugly and cruel debate his case is well made. He has a thousand stories to tell and tells them well Sunday Times

This useful and readable book should provoke many readers to reconsider their picture of Britishness, and to realise how much of our enterprise and tolerance has originated from the interplay with immigrants who were once seen as dangerously foreign Guardian

Robert Winders totally absorbing and revelatory book could not be more timely astutely punctures many balloons of false national pride Daily Mail

[A] splendidly researched and subtle history of immigration Observer

Robert Winder, in twenty-five chapters of swift prose and bold observation, tells a story for the times History Today

In his elegant and timely study Winder has culled a wide array of not easily accessible scholarship on the history of different minority groups in this country and from it constructed a portrait of the nation that should be required reading for those toxic spewers at Migration Watch New Statesman

[Winder] has a good eye for the telling anecdote and there is much to intrigue and delight Spectator

Winders book is timely. It is a lively and ably constructed chronicle, a synoptic overview based on good historical sources, with a strong and welcome contemporary spin. Perhaps a copy should be sent to every leader of the British National Party Scotland on Sunday

People on every side in the immigration debate will find their complacent assumptions shaken by this brilliantly argued, well-researched and challenging work This is a deeply optimistic book, celebrating a part of the British character and experience that is too often ignored Literary Review

A coherent and readable narrative account. What [Winder] offers in effect is a different kind of British history: history seen through the eyes of those who have stepped ashore in an alien Britain, and so transformed their own lives and that of their adoptive country. It is a story that could be replicated in many countries. But Winders book is especially important for contemporary Britain Times Literary Supplement

In a very attractive way, it brings immigration and immigrants to life with an abundance of stories of the personal experiences, good and bad, of immigrants in Britain, with some remarkable and moving examples going back to the Middle Ages Evening Standard

Winder documents each wave of immigration with clarity and humour. Immigration, he argues, is the sincerest form of flattery Few put the case for immigration as persuasively He demonstrates that without it Britain would be much impoverished and much less interesting Scottish Sunday Herald

Deftly written a highly readable contribution that charts the forging of a multicultural nation Irish Examiner

Ultimately, this is not the story of immigration to Britain; it is the story of Britain itself Times Educational Supplement