How England Made the English by Harry Mount: review Complete the sequence: Bangladesh, Taiwan, South Korea, Lebanon, Rwanda... Next comes England: it's the sixth most crowded country on Earth, according to this book. Forget, for the moment, lax immigration controls and the generosity of our welfare state. A deeper explanation, says Harry Mount, lies in a subject that never much gripped me at school, geography. Hospitable weather conditions, easily fordable rivers, and a shortage of marshes and unconquerable mountains made England the rich, advanced country it just about remains today. Our lives, tastes and prosperity have been shaped by land mass and climate. We are who we are because of where we live. England is not a land of prairies or Grand Canyons, the extent of which causes Americans in public spaces to talk louder than we do. It's a cosy place, with a complex geology that causes the look of things to change every few miles and, for our position on the globe, an unreasonably temperate climate, due to the Gulf Stream. In countries where nature comes in size XXL, you don't stroll, you hike. On the other hand, we carry a raincoat, and Mr Chamberlain was identified with his umbrella. Mount believes that Latins are chattier than us because they can stand around in the sunshine, socialising, while we scurry into our burrows. Hence the English male's diffidence in conversation, particularly with the opposite sex. That's the danger of discussions about national identity: they fall back on stereotypes. But Mount generally avoids them, preferring to observe background details such as curb stones (granite, roughened by "chitting" so that leather-soled shoes don't slip on them) and chimneypots (a subject of such caprice to the Tudors), which few other people would have noticed. There's a whole chapter on Our National Soil Collection. Urban man doesn't think much about the soil, on which all life depends. Hubristically, he assumes he can scatter Olympic Parks and Boris Islands where he pleases. But just as Erda, the Earth Goddess, arises at inconvenient moments during Wagner's Ring cycle, so even the shiniest of new projects have found that the eternal genius loci, or spirit of place, can bite them on the bottom. Heathrow's £4.3billion Terminal 5 is, we learn, subject to "heave." As though affronted, the bosom of the Earth swells, and tiles on up-to-the-minute airport structures crack. It's a process that can go on for decades. Since railways started to shuttle building materials from one part of the country to another, we've been doing our best to eliminate the particularity that Mount enjoys. All hail to this book: it shows that more survives than one might have thought. How England Made the English Harry Mount Viking, £20, 368pp Clive Aslet is editor-at-large of Country Life