Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: a 'lefty-liberal, anti-racist, feminist Muslim' and inveterate rule-breaker

But the 65-year-old Ugandan-Asian writer, who settled in England in 1972, isn't quite persuaded.

Though her new book is titled Exotic England: The Making Of A Curious Nation, she does not identify herself as English, but as British.

Many of the people she is closest to are English, including her husband of nearly 25 years, Colin Brown. They met on the platform at Bristol Temple Meads railway station in 1988, when she was still reeling from the end of her marriage to a fellow Ugandan-Asian. She looked into Colin Brown's face and was enchanted by this "boyish white bloke", then a race researcher, now chairman of the consumer services panel of the Financial Services Authority. They were "ideological soul mates".

Alibhai-Brown's 21-year-old daughter is half-English. Her son, from her first marriage, is married to an English woman. Of the four friends she would "completely trust with my life", three are English, one Asian. Since 1978 she has lived in the same house in Ealing, an area she "loves" and which, she says proudly, is in "one of the most mixed areas in London".

"I'm never going to leave this flat till I die," she adds. Often when she talks of the country that is her home, it's as if she's speaking of a love affair, a marriage to someone she frequently admires but occasionally hates, who sometimes drives her potty. She feels "a great deal of affection for this country"; but frequently, she feels "very cross with it".

On the face of it, her latest book reads like a love letter to the country she has settled in. But it is more than that: it is an impassioned attack on myth that Britain has ever been a small island, self-contained, a little fortress of native white people. She has dug down into history and unearthed countless tales of how Britain has been touched and entranced by other cultures. Among them, the fact that there were "Africans in England before the English were": among the Roman battalions at Hadrian's Wall, long before the Anglo-Saxons arrived.

"Nobody," writes Alibhai-Brown, "agrees on what the English character is." She has her own stab at identifying a defining characteristic, and comes up with the notion of "openness to the 'other'", which, she says is "an incorrigible aspect of the Anglo-Saxon identity".

"This is a book about the English people who went out to other parts of the world and were entranced by them, and also about the immigrants who come here, [who], even when the experiences are really hard, eventually can't but help fall in love with England." But it's also about the difficult truths attached to empire, racism and slavery.

Alibhai-Brown has been on the sharp end of racism. She has been spat at and had a woman pull at her earring, cutting her ear. Mostly where she experiences the worst racism now, though, is in the letters and emails she gets from "great, Ukip patriots saying that I should leave and that I have no place in their country, and that it was so much better in the 1950s before our lot arrived".

Little that Alibhai-Brown does or says does not provoke. She describes herself as a "lefty liberal, anti-racist, feminist Muslim" , but, what's refreshing about her is that sometimes the things she says upset the groups she purports to identify with. She is not afraid to upset, nor to be wrong, nor even to say she has been wrong. On her website she lists the many people she has offended over the years, ranging from Prince Charles to The Board of Jewish Deputies. Among them are also the mullahs and Muslim apologists, who, she writes "want to go further".

She confesses that she "can't bear rules". Her husband, she says, has told her she will never be able to work in an institution because of this. "People say to me why don't you go into politics? Well, I couldn't, could I? I could never follow a line. And the very first thing would be swearing allegiance to the Queen. I am a republican. I will not swear allegiance to anyone in the royal family." In fact, she handed back her MBE, partly as a protest against the Iraq War, but also to assert her republican stance.

Recently, she published Refusing The Veil, an attack on veil-wearing, which she described as a retreat from "progressive values". "A veiled female," she wrote, "to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential." She has never worn the veil and never will, because her mother, "threw it off". "My mother has had a very profound influence on my life. She was central to everything that I am."

That book caused an enormous reaction, particularly within the Muslim community. In an article, she described how at a gathering to discuss her book one woman asked her who gave her "permission" to write it, and another told her that her mother would have slapped her had she been alive.

Almost everything she writes causes online reaction, some of it hate-filled, some appreciative. She says her policy is not to look at what's published about her on the internet or on Twitter. "I block it all out. I couldn't get out of bed if I looked at the stuff. These people hate me because I'm a public face and I'm supposed still to be their cook and ayah, their servant. And what am I doing where I am?"

But actually, I get the impression that Alibhai-Brown is more a well-loved British institution than figure of loathing. "I have a lot of fans actually," she confesses. " I get wonderful letters and everywhere I go people come up and say things like, 'Thank God you're here.' White people as well as brown people and black people."

Though Exotic England is a book for almost anyone in these isles, it reaches out to particular groups. To, for instance, anti-immigrant, white English people, the type who might vote Ukip, who, she says, "think they are small island people ... and think that there was some kind of pure little England and then all these funny people came and spoilt it." If they read her book, she hopes, they will "realise that they are islanders who have always looked out".

She hopes too that Muslims will read Exotic England. "Especially young, hot-headed Muslims who think that there's only ever always been hatred between England and them since the Crusades, which is again, a nonsense." Many, she says, don't know anything about the long relationship between the cultures, nor do they appreciate the freedoms they have. "These young Muslims who are born in here and have all the advantages - if only they could talk to people from Muslim countries who would give anything to have the right to come and live here."

But this book also contains a message for the Scots, whom Alibhai-Brown believes "are probably more monocultural and much more inward-looking than the English". She despairs, for instance, of our failure to fully recognise our own role as colonisers, slave traders and masters. "Most Scots I know," she says, "have shoved the blame of Empire and slavery onto England.

"Almost every time I come to Scotland I meet someone who says, 'We were the first to be colonised by England and then it was you.' And I laugh. I say, you lot were there. I saw you. You were there." She cites, for instance, how Robert Burns "almost went off to be a slave driver and only didn't go because his book started selling".

On CNN, where she is one of the pundits talking about the General Election, she has spoken favourably of the SNP, who she sees as "good because they're social democrats". In the last election, she voted Liberal Democrat because of the changes Labour had made to the asylum law and her despair that the party took us into the war in Iraq. "Once, but never again," she says. She has now come back round to Labour. "I quite like Ed. I like the fact that he's not Blair, not a smooth-talker who will con the people."

At times Alibhai-Brown has been breathtakingly candid about her own life and experiences. She has written of the pain of her divorce, her first husband leaving her for a young student, her two abortions. In Exotic England, she describes how when she first introduced her husband to her mother, he was dressed in a pink shirt and wore a hoop evening. Her mother disapproved."Look at him. Long hair, dressing like a girl," she said. "[Your] first husband, one of us, betrayed you. You think this man will be better?"

By the time her mother was dying, however, she wanted her son-in-law to carry her coffin. And Colin Brown was not the only Englishman her mother had grown to appreciate - there was also Alibhai-Brown's brother-in-law who lovingly looked after her mentally ill sister. "My mum used to always say," she says, "'Both my daughters, what would they be without these Englishmen?'"

"English men," Alibhai-Brown says. "When you find the right ones they are actually very good." She pauses, then reemphasises: "The right ones."

"Mind you," she says, returning to thoughts of her husband, "we still have terrible rows. Because I often accuse him of imperialism. He won't learn any of my languages. The history is always there in our household."

Her parents' marriage, she says, wasn't a happy one. "But, you know, nobody divorced then." Though she was very close to her mother, her father stopped talking to her when she was in her teens, after she appeared as Juliet opposite a black Romeo in a Shakespeare production. They had touched and kissed on stage, a taboo in the Ugandan society in which they lived. "He couldn't bear that," she says, "that was the deep racism of that society.".

Yet it's to her father that she attributes her own "very independent mind". That independence, she believes, stems from having no sense of loyalty. "Loyalty to nation, to family," she says, "these aren't good things." She doesn't even expect her children to be loyal to her - and often they are not. "But it's great. They love me. That's different."

Love. It's a word she often uses. More often than not it's how she talks of the country that is her home: not in terms of loyalty or even belonging, but of love. "I don't feel I can ever really be English," she says. "But I'm coming to terms with my nation, I suppose. And finally learning to love it."

Exotic England: The Making Of A Curious Nation is published by Portobello Books. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is at the Aye Write festival on April 25 at 1.30pm, www.ayewrite.com