A Portuguese academic has launched a fierce criticism of English culture in a book which describes them as “unrestrained wild beasts”.
The best-selling book, titled “Bifes Mal Pasados” (Undercooked Steaks), was written by Joao Magueijo, a physician and professor at Imperial College London.
Mr Magueijo attacks many of the blights of English culture, which he describes as “one of the most rotten in the world”, focusing on binge drinking, obesity and the propensity for violence in his 188-page book.
He writes that the English culture is “pathologically violent” and that the people are “always fighting. I never met such a group of animals.
“The English are unrestrained wild beasts and are totally out of control,” he adds.
The academic continues to denounce the nation’s habit for over-drinking, claiming that the English often consume enough alcohol to inebriate a horse.
“It is not unusual to drink 12 pints, or two huge buckets of beer, per person,” Mr Magueijo writes. “Even a horse would get drunk with this but in England it is standard practice.
“In England, real men have to drink like sponges, eat like skeletons and throw up everything at the end of the evening.”
A Blackpool A&E department is later described as looking like “a field hospital after battle”, while he also lays into the cleanliness of the English.
“When you visit English homes, or the toilets at schools or in student lodgings, they are all so disgusting that even my grandmother’s poultry cage is cleaner,” Mr Magueijo writes.
Fish and chips, one of the nation’s favourite meals, also fails to escape his criticism (“It makes you want to wash it with detergent before eating”) while people from the north of England are said to be “incredibly obese, men and women with three-metre waists made of fat and lard.”
Mr Magueijo told the Sunday times he does “not fear any backlash” over the book, and that he trusts “the British sense of humour”.
The book, which has sold over 20,000 copies in Portugal, is only published in the native language and is not set to be translated into English.