cinema broke on these shores. J B Priestley notes in Angel Pavement (1930), his teeming novel of Depression-era London, that the appearance and gestures of a character called Edna Smeeth are those of "an Americanised Polish jewess" -- presumably Greta Garbo -- "who, from her nest in Hollywood, had stamped them on these young girls all over the world". My father (born 1921) was Edna's male equivalent, always liable to interrupt family meal-times with a snatch of "Ice-cold Katy won't you marry the soldier?" and disliking Ronald Reagan less for his policies than for his debased professional status as a B-movie actor. There have been times when the pendulum swung back the other way -- see the 1960s colonisation of America by British pop -- but generally speaking this reverse imperialism has been in place for three-quarters of a century. One of the subliminal reasons why British people are so indifferent to continental Europe is that most of their cultural influences come from the other direction. ... The book I most enjoyed reading last week was an omnibus edition of Posy Simmonds's cartoons about the Weber family, first offered to readers of The Guardian in the 1980s and now reissued to mark the 25th anniversary of the series' close. The great merit of the adventures of George and Wendy Weber, an irreproachably liberal couple, addicted to all the good brave causes, was that they sharply exposed most of the attitudes espoused by the medium in which they featured: Guardian readers