A decade of writing insightful dispatches about the British way of life for The New York Times seems only to have whetted Sarah Lyall's Anglocentric appetite. Proof of the pudding is in The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British (Norton), her deliciously irreverent first book, which strips bare the British psyche, sparing none of its blushes. The American-born correspondent begins and ends with that soggy yet ever so nostalgic staple of British life: the picnic. She learns that "when invited to a picnic in the country, you should bring an extra sweater, and possibly some extra food." It is precisely this kind of wry advice that more conventional travel books fail to provide. In between, Lyall trains her outsider's eye on everything from cricket to chronically deficient dental care, fox hunting to hedgehogs, Stone Age-style sex education to the Great British indulgence of eccentricity. Lyall also reflects upon aspects of her own married life to the British writer and former newspaper editor Robert McCrum, and in so doing evinces a very English kind of self-deprecation: "Just as some women are inexplicably attracted to prison inmates, so others yearn above all for Englishmen." Even Oscar Wilde would have appreciated that one.

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