Americans are infamous on the eastern side of the Atlantic for knowing little or nothing about European culture, history and politics – and for being proud of the fact, as Richard Hofstadter, the late Columbia historian, described in them in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1964.
Much less widely recognized is how little Europeans know about America, Americans and their own civilization – an ignorance that troubles them not at all, perhaps because they seem to be unaware of the fact.
