I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Norfolk Club to give a talk to their History Group about my book “An English Tradition?”

I had an enthusiastic audience with some great questions. One person asked whether the Japanese samurai had a fair play code which was very similar to the English. My answer was that the bushido code of the samurai had been romanticised in the early 20th century with the conscious aim of creating a parallel with the European cult of chivalry – I didn’t feel that the real samurai of the Middle Ages had a strong concept of what we now call fair play.