About
Main squeeze? AngloFile on the roof of Yorkminster cathedral.
Mandy Katz lives in a Maryland neighborhood called “English Village” but inhabits a truly English village in her mind.
It wasn’t always this way. Growing up in New Jersey, Mandy discovered Freddie Laker, the Eurailpass and backpacking in her teens, managing to visit several countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East before she was 25. She even spent a year in China and Israel, freelance writing.
All without setting foot on English soil.
Having dabbled in French, Mandarin, Hebrew, Japanese and German, Mandy reasoned, why visit a country where people just speak a mangled version of her native tongue?
That all changed, though, when she married the son of an ex-Londoner. Her mother-in-law may cleave to American wonders like minivans and the Redskins, but Mandy went the other way, after family visits took her to Frome and Bromsgrove, Dudley and Sudbury-on-Thames. When business led to London in 1999, she homesteaded with her husband and three young kids in a Hyde Park flat for two months and never got over leaving.
Now, every trip she takes seems to go through a U.K. airport. Armchair travel and web-surfing, too, lead Mandy to all things British – news, arts, books and food. It’s all fodder for Anglofiles, as well as her tweets, @Anglofilia and her AngloFiles: TGIF column, appearing two Fridays a month at Anglotopia and chronicling great (and not-so-great) British parties you may (be glad to) have missed.
Away from AngloFiles, Mandy writes regularly for the New York Times Styles section and is a senior editor at Moment magazine. She and her suitably Anglo-Saxon husband are raising three teenagers who know how to ride a “lift,” recognize that a “rubber” is not a condom, and refuse to wear “Wellies.” They revere English candy above all other varieties.
To CONTACT Mandy, email: anglofilesmailATgmailDOTcom.
