The story I am setting out to tell in this book has not been told before. It narrates the life-long involvement of a sensitive, intelligent, witty and politically conscious foreign observer with England and the English – an involvement that began on the very day of his birth in Düsseldorf on the Rhine, and ended in 1856, when he died in a Parisian apartment house. What he observed and experienced was first and foremost English men and women, institutions and policies, books and journals, of his own day; but he extended this experience backwards, into English history and English literature of the past, which he constantly related to his present. The resulting picture is shaped by traditional preconceptions, by political considerations, by social philosophies of various kinds, and by aesthetic experiences; it is based on personal encounters with British people in England, France and Italy as well as on printed records ranging from Shakespeare to the London Morning Chronicle; and its form is partly determined by the observer's special flair for verbal caricature.

Heine is not just a verbal cartoonist, however. He is a poet, who finds in English writers a source of inspiration and an occasional irritant, provoking creation along different lines. He is a student of history schooled by Hegel, who seeks characteristic turning-points and characteristic expressions of a ‘World Spirit’ in the development of peoples, nations and states.