When New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall married an Englishman and moved to London in the mid-1990s, she experienced unexpected culture shock in her adopted country. As she came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog-lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), she found that she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life, and she reflects on it here with wit and an eye for ironies.