If Britain were a building, it would be a crumbling stately home; still grand but decrepit now in parts, its gardens overgrown and its floorboards warped. Or at least that's what most Germans think, according to John Kampfner's Why the Germans Do It Better (Atlantic), the book that perhaps best captures the state we're in despite not actually being about us. It’s been a lousy year for British exceptionalism, or the overconfident belief in this country being inherently better than any other, whether at handling pandemics or bending Brexit negotiations to its will.

Kampfner, a former foreign correspondent whose Jewish father fled his home in Bratislava as Hitler's army advanced, isn't blind to German failings. His title, he confesses, horrifies German friends who beg him to include more of what their country is getting wrong. But he writes with great affection about a nation that he calls "a bulwark of decency and stability", rising again and again to the given challenge; reuniting peacefully with the East, opening its doors to refugees, tackling the coronavirus pandemic. Even Germans' dogged attachment to what may seem rather stifling social norms – when Kampfner was living there a neighbour once left a note on his car, urging him politely to clean it because it was "bringing down the reputation of the street" – served them well, he argues, in lockdown. But ultimately he sees Germany's greatest strength as its willingness to interrogate and doubt itself, a habit instilled during the postwar years of moral reckoning. One for armchair travellers – it made me itch to visit Berlin – but also those approaching Brexit’s final frontier with a nagging sense of loss.