It was also the century when Britain and France fought for global mastery

It was also the century when Britain and France fought for global mastery. In such a context, admiration for things British (by Voltaire and others) and French (by Hume and others) was thought akin to treason. The Duke of Newcastle, bulwark of the Whig-Protestant hegemony, was considered “unsound” because he liked French cuisine. In an entertaining excursus on Hogarth, Rogers traces beef and culinary motifs in the engravings, and points up the rampant xenophobia.The archetype of John Bull, arrogant, beleaguered but triumphant, expresses disdain for the French. Rogers links the 18th-century cult of beef to those disgusting manifestations of Georgian England: the baiting of bulls and bears.This is a fascinating jeu d’esprit ably conducted by an engaging author. Rogers is always entertaining and basically sound, but he suffers from having to locate his study mainly in the 18th century, of which he does not have an expert knowledge. His population estimate for Britain in this century (ten million) is too high, his knowledge of the Jacobites sketchy, and it is absurd to say that until 1756 France fought wars with England simply to restore the Stuarts.

Indeed, it was a constant lament of the Jacobites that the French would only act through economic self-interest.Rogers does stress that roast beef and its cluster of symbols was an English phenomenon in the 18th century. Only in the 19th century, with the improved breeds of Scottish cattle, did it become the roast beef of old Britain. Rogers is most incisive in his treatment of the beef motif from 1800 on: the world in which 18th-century symbols had real meaning had ceased to exist, but these “signs” continued almost at an unconscious level To the French, we are still les rosbifs.. There used to be something wonderful about going to a park to feed the pigeons.

As a child, having the birds peck viciously, even drawing blood, was part of the fun. Now, it’s easy to walk past a pigeonless Trafalgar Square, see the fountain brimming with foam, and hope Westminster Council has tried to poison the dirty birds. They’re valuable co-habitants and, if cast by the Whitbread-winning novelist Patrick Neate, knowledgeable too. Take Ravenscourt, Neate’s philosophising pigeon and part-time narrator. He is a commentator only London could have produced, from the first signs of trouble – the battle of Trafalgar (“a battle named after a square named after a battle”) – through three encounters in the London Pigeon Wars (waged between the RPF of the West End and the Surbs) to the fall of Murray, the human “peepnik” that Ravenscourt calls Mishap.A Surb himself, Ravenscourt is at the scene of the initial skirmish at Trafalgar.

Murray is also there, eating chicken (the only food he ever eats), and seconds from earning the title Mishap when he chances a meeting with his old college friend, Tom. Watched by Surb leader Gunnersbury and the RPF’s “starling geez Regent”, Murray tosses what’s left of the chicken towards a bin And so the fateful fight begins. The spoils become known as the Remnant of Content, a symbol of the birds’ London turf war.Ten years before, Tom and Murray’s last meeting was a fractious event. Murray claims he spent the decade either parading as a guru in India, as a rag-trader in Jo’burg, or a musician in Europe. Tom is in the final throes of therapy and disentangling a failed relationship.