Borges on England

Tony Blair's address to the joint session of Congress reminded me of something Jorge Luis Borges wrote at the end of the Second World War:

Of England, of the complex and almost infinite England, of that torn and lateral island that rules continents and the seas, I will not risk a definition; it is enough to recall that it is perhaps the only country that is not fascinated with itself, that does not believe itself to be Paradise or Utopia. I think of England as one thinks of a loved one, as something unique and irreplaceable. It is capable of reproachable indecision, of terrible slowness (it tolerats Franco, it tolerates the subsidiaries of Franco), but it is also capable of rectification and contrition, of returning to wage once more, when the shadow of a sword falls across the world, the cyclical battle of Waterloo.

Indeed.