Oriental who cannot be trusted, the fawning Uncle Tom, the sensuous and self-indulgent Turk, the humorless German who is mindlessly obedient to authority, the uptight and sneering Englishman, the honest but ignorant Scottish Highlander, and so on. Indeed, today it is American soap operas, more than historians, that tend to indulge such fantasies: is there a single character with an English accent who is not devious and implacably evil? And who has not become bored over the last few decades with hearing