'Unrestrained wild beasts who eat food so greasy it needs detergent'
A best-selling book written by a Portuguese academic has offered a dismal portrayal of English people, calling them 'unrestrained wild beasts who eat food so greasy it needs detergent'.
Joao Magueijo, 47, a physics professor at Imperial College London, has seen his book, Bifes Mal Passados (Undercooked Beef) sell more than 20,000 copies in his native country.
Despite spending 25 years of his life on these shores, he describes England as 'one of the most rigid and rotten societies in Europe, possibly the world'.
He says the English are 'always fighting' and claims 'I never met such a group of animals' - English culture is pathologically violent'.
Describing a four-hour wait in a Blackpool hospital's A&E department one Sunday afternoon, he says 'it looked like a field hospital after battle'.
"When you visit English homes, or the toilets at schools or in student lodgings, they are all so disgusting that even my grandmother's poultry cage is cleaner," he writes.
He goes on to describe the nation as being one of the 'most rotten societies in the world' in a 188 page diatribe in which he also describes his hosts as 'violent animals'.
Magueijo also takes umbrage with Britain's drinking culture.
"It is not unusual to drink 12 pints, or two huge buckets of beer, per person," he writes.
"Even a horse would get drunk with this but in England it is standard practice.
"In England real men have to drink like sponges, eat like skeletons and throw up everything at the end of the evening."
Magueijo relates an episode from his time as a don at the University of Cambridge in which a female student vomited during a formal dinner and continued eating, drinking and 'shouting nonsense as if nothing had happened'.