It is April 23, also known as St George's Day, the patron saint of England.

It is also the generally accepted birthday of one of England's most famous sons – possibly more famous abroad even than at home – William Shakespeare.

It is somehow ironic that in England the language of Shakespeare should be such an apparent barrier to the wider interest in his works from the public, and yet abroad, where the language barrier is surely greater, there is such a continuing fascination with his genius.

Nevertheless, the coinciding of these dates would have given any other country on earth the perfect excuse for a bit of self-indulgent feasting and celebration of identity.

In England, however, there is a certain reticence toward jingoism, patriotism, whatever you like to call it.

It is rather charming and olde-worlde in one way – the self-effacing English character which doesn't like to put itself forward until its back is up against the wall.

That is very much at odds with the characteristics which created England as a country and have sustained it through the centuries since.

The Angles and Saxons who migrated here after the departure of the Romans and very slowly began to build kingdoms of their own, were given to beating up their neighbours and annexing their land.

However, the kingdom which eventually came out on top, Wessex, has always been portrayed as a more civilised centre of learning and creativity, partly through one of its most famous kings, Alfred the Great.

But around that time probably the most unifying factor in any English kingdom was opposition to the Danish invaders.

Despite being taken over by Denmark in the form of King Canute and his successors for a little while, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, and its English population, survived until 1066, when we all know what happened.

It was a long time before the English finally surfaced again and when they did they had a more aggressive and aggrandising view of the world.

From the Hundred Years War through the heyday of Queen Elizabeth I and down to the empire of Queen Victoria it is one long story of taking over other people's lands.

It used to be argued in the old days that becoming a colony of the empire had been good for the poor little unenlightened natives, but now we know that they, too, had a culture of their own, and they have come out from under the yoke in the same way as the English did from the Normans.

There seems to be a sort of collective national guilt about all this that has made many English people unwilling to take the sort of pride in their nationality that others do.

That in itself is somewhat patronising – like saying to the world: "It is all very well for you little nations to take pride in yourselves. It is good and creative. But for the English it is different.