Adieu gin, au revoir roast beef! How Hogarth became a proud European

In one of his most celebrated paintings, O the Roast Beef of Old England, William Hogarth appears as himself, sketching the fortifications at Calais at the very moment of being mistakenly arrested as a spy in 1748. It is not what you would call a subtle scene. The raggedy French soldiers are on their last legs, barely sustained by watery soup, while a gaggle of fishwives resemble the flounder they are selling from their tatty basket. There’s a fat, greedy friar trying to get his hands on a sumptuous joint of beef which has just been unloaded and is on its way to one of the many English restaurants that thrive in Calais (only 200 years earlier the town had belonged to Britain). Spying, by implication, is not something that Britons resort to, although the figure of Hogarth busily sketching to one side is a warning not to dismiss as dense. The “Old England” Hogarth conjures up here is affluent, abundant and free. The French, meanwhile, are reduced