With all eyes on Israel and Iraq this week, London is enjoying a respite from the global scrutiny that followed the July 7 bombings. The English are trying not to think about terrorism and doing instead the things they like to do in summer.

One of these is watching their cricket team play their ancient rivals, the Australians, for the Ashes. This oddest of all sports trophies is actually a funerary urn, containing the “ashes” of English cricket, a Victorian joke made after England lost for the first time to Australia more than a century ago. Nowadays, the Australians are the best in the world, and England has not won the Ashes for some 20 years. So there is great excitement this year because the series of “Test” matches between the two teams is balanced on a knife-edge.

A game that quite recently looked doomed to be marginalized here by richer and more internationally popular sports, such as soccer, has suddenly gripped the nation: On Monday, 20,000 spectators had to be turned away from the Test match in Manchester. This revival of interest in cricket is not only a welcome distraction, but expresses a profound affirmation of national identity at a time when terrorism poses both an external and an internal threat. Just as Americans felt a surge of patriotism after the trauma of September 11, 2001, so the British may be quietly rediscovering theirs now.

The old forms of British patriotism, regarded as obsolescent at home, still exert their magnetism abroad. At a conference in Vancouver last weekend, something struck me: The top item on the news channels was not the impending trade war with America, or the latest squabble between English-speaking federalists and French-speaking sovereigntists, but the funeral at sea of the last surviving Canadian World War II veteran to have received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest decoration for bravery. Canada – a nation that has been independent for over a century, and latterly dominated by politically correct liberals – is still moved by a symbol created in the high noon of Victorian imperialism.

Britishness also notoriously manifests itself in that extreme form of individualism known (and celebrated) as the eccentric. One of these eccentrics is an elderly Catholic nun, Sister Mary Michael, who is taking on the unusual alliance of Hollywood and the Church of England. She is attempting to halt the filming of Dan Brown’s best seller, “The Da Vinci Code,” at Lincoln Cathedral, Westminster Abbey having refused to open its doors to Sony Pictures.

So when Tom Hanks arrived at the medieval film set this week, Sister Mary was waiting for them. She denounced the novel, less for its depiction of Opus Dei as a murderous mafia, than for rehashing the Gnostic heresy that Jesus married Mary Magdalene: “To a believer, any believer, what is happening is blasphemous. It is an offence against God. I am not going to bash any one over the head with a Bible. I am just trying to make reparation to God.”

Her real quarrel is with the cathedral chapter and its dean, the Very Reverend Alec Knight, whom she accuses of the ancient sin of buying or selling spiritual goods, simony. The local Member of Parliament for Lincoln, Edward Leigh, had also protested to the dean, but to no avail, as he told me sadly a few weeks ago. Only when a diminutive nun mounted her lonely vigil did the press and TV sit up and take notice. They, too, love an eccentric.

As it happens, the man who built this great cathedral – its 12th-century bishop, Saint Hugh of Lincoln – was among the first of these English eccentrics, though he was actually born in Avalon, France. An unworldly Carthusian monk, Hugh (c. 1135-1200) stood up to three Plantagenets, the mightiest and most bad-tempered dynasty in English history. King Henry II was the king, remember, whose outburst against the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, led to the latter’s murder in his own cathedral. So Hugh was taking his life in his hands when he defused a royal tantrum by making a cheeky joke at the king’s expense, or refused to found a monastery until the king had compensated those who lost their homes, or when, like his mythical contemporary Robin Hood, he supported the commoners against the king’s ferocious chief forester, whom he excommunicated.

Hugh handled with no less aplomb the equally terrifying Richard the Lionheart – whose grudging respect he earned – and John, the king who was later forced to sign Magna Carta. Hugh’s hagiographer tells us that King John spent many hours at the saint’s bedside as he lay dying, but Hugh was not fooled. Urged by his boss, Archbishop Hubert Walter, to ask forgiveness for his defiance, Hugh replied dryly that his only regret was that his criticisms of the king had not been tougher.

Hugh’s bravest act was to face down lynch mobs rioting against the Jews of Lincoln, not once but several times. At a time of resurgent Christian anti-Semitism, such acts required moral as well as physical courage, and they mark Hugh out as a great eccentric. Years after his death, a young boy (confusingly also known as St. Hugh of Lincoln) was found dead. The Jews were falsely blamed for this “ritual murder,” and many of them were tortured or hanged in one of the most infamous medieval pogroms.

At a time when our television screens are filled with images of Palestinian Arab terrorists exulting over the removal of Jewish settlers from Gaza by the Israeli army, it is well for Christians to remember the skeletons in their own closets. In Europe, for a public figure to actively combat anti-Semitism, even at the risk of offending some Muslims, is still eccentric. It isn’t only the English who need more eccentrics.