Not an English phrase, as it turns out, but American. Who'd have thought it? Nonetheless, as Ian Hislop's recent series showed, it came to sum up a kind of Britishness - stoicism in the face of adversity, keeping calm and carrying on. Hislop's series, inevitably, raised as many questions as it answered - it would be interesting to analyse further how the notion of the stiff upper lip varied according to class, for example, or the different forms it took between the sexes, or whether it is British, or English.
From the Our Island Stories group blog about national identity, a bit of almost forgotten history, and the story of another, but rather different, official cover up.
