My hero of the week? Well, it's a crowded field. David Walliams recommends himself for coming out as an unapologetic lover of Frankie Howerd. And you have to love the Archbishop of York for slapping down a Labour Cabinet minister's vulgar money-worship. Neverthless, one man stands out: Captain Christopher Wells.

Cap'n Wells is a naval man, but he doesn't exactly serve in an area of nautical endeavour known for its heroism. He's in charge of a P&O cruise liner. The most vicious battles he's likely to have seen in his 52 years will have been on the quoits deck. But last week he displayed courage at sea bordering on the recklessness of a Drake or a Frobisher. Disturbed by the number of passengers he observed reserving their sun loungers by slapping a towel on them early in the day and then gallivanting off elsewhere, he took to the Tannoy to remonstrate with the lounger-hoggers for their “Germanic” behaviour.

However funny, or otherwise, the captain's ticking-off was meant to be, it was undeniably courageous. Making any sort of generalisation about any nation these days is viewed with the same disdain we would once have reserved for goosing a nun. Short of smoking indoors or buying a 4x4 it's hard to think of more provocative behaviour. And, indeed, scarcely had the observation about Germans and towels passed Captain Wells's lips than he was being reported to the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

I have every confidence that Trevor Phillips and the EHRC will treat Captain Wells's comments, and the reaction they provoked, with nothing more than the wry smile they merit. But, for myself, I'd like to go farther. Because his comments sparked a curious reaction in my breast.

It was a sort of shrug of recognition. For I realised as I reflected on his story that, even though I was born in Edinburgh, educated in Aberdeen and live in southeast England I am, in fact, German.

If one thinks of all the traits so casually, and artlessly, attributed to the Germans - then they apply to me. I am an early riser, fond of order and rigour, naturally deferential to hierarchies, addicted to large meals composed predominantly of fatty meats and fattening carbohydrates, a lover of Wagner, Gothic architecture and cakes, incapable of dressing unobtrusively in casual clothing, a huge fan of England and yet curiously keen on beating them at football. I have often wondered why I love Germany so much and find holidaying there so congenial. And the answer, apart from the sheer charm of its people, is that I had never properly realised that I was coming home...

So when Captain Wells issued his sideswipe at Germanic behaviour, not only did I feel a sympathetic wince. I also realised that, just as we all have an inner age, the age that always suits our character whatever it says on our birth certificate, making Cliff Richard forever a twentysomething and ensuring that even when Jack Straw was a student radical he was still just shy of 55, so we also all have an inner nationality. Whatever it says on our passport, most of us may find that we are spiritually something else.

My wife's inner nationality is Italian: she regards shoes and handbags as perishable goods, alongside bread and milk, she believes traffic light signals are like fashion magazine tips - amusing suggestions that might come in useful one day - and she has natural, instinctive, good taste. Except in men.

My father-in-law's inner nationality is Russian - ask him for a soft drink and he'll give you a beer. Insist on something non-alcoholic and you'll get white wine. His idea of understated dressing is black shirt and crocodile shoes - or vice-versa - and yet he is a man of great philosophical depth, whose soul can be moved more violently than you could imagine any man's could be wrenched by the sound of a 19th-century violin lament.

Of my Times colleagues I would say that Ben Macintyre, Scots-born as he also is, is really an Irishman inside - effortlessly skilful with words, possessed of a rare gift for hospitality and always, quizzically, good-naturedly and shock-headedly in revolt against regimentation and conformity. William Rees-Mogg, like another great writer, Julian Barnes, is spiritually French. They love the classical in literature, they are devoted to Enlightenment philosophy, they are analytical in politics and romantic about landscape, as well as being natural fashioners of epigrams and paradoxes. Matthew Parris is really a Scot: he can't take English pomposity seriously, he's most at home in mountainous or austere surroundings and his politics are those of Adam Smith - framed by a desire to get value for money and avoid meddling in matters that we can scarcely hope to control. Mary Ann Sieghart is American: restlessly optimistic, always in search of the novel and groundbreaking, almost genetically immune to cynicism or sourness.

And, more broadly, Hillary Clinton is Swedish (a compliment in my book), Bill Clinton is Greek (warm, spontaneous, a brilliant orator but, as Hillary could tell you, someone familiar with the sound of broken crockery), Geoff Hoon is Belgian (say no more) and Gordon Brown is North Korean (everything is controlled from the centre but nothing works, he doesn't realise how comic the stage management looks to the outside world but the energy that goes into propaganda is awe-inspiring).

Of course, for most Times readers, their inner and outer nationalities will be as one: English - calm, rational, possessed of a robust sense of humour and therefore able to see that the ability to make jokes, rather than war, out of national stereotypes is a sign of progress...

Squalid gangs who betrayed Ireland
The historian Michael Burleigh got it in the neck rather from a Guardian reviewer for allegedly being less than fair in his writing on Ireland. Burleigh is used to attracting criticism from left-liberal quarters: in a climate where people often minimise, relativise or excuse political violence, he is robust in reminding us that the IRA and its loyalist counterparts were squalid, murderous, morally repulsive outfits. But what struck me most about the attack on Burleigh was not the critique offered by the writer, but the unconscious revelation of his own standpoint. The reviewer took exception to Burleigh's analysis of the Easter Rising and asked: “Is his position that Ireland should have achieved self-determination only through the ballot box?”

To which one has to ask, is it the reviewer's position that an Ireland that was on its way to Home Rule, whose sons were fighting for Britain on the Western Front and whose representatives were elected on the same suffrage as any other UK politician, could validly progress to self-determination only through violent insurrection? Perhaps the greatest disservice we still do to Ireland is to minimise, excuse or even romanticise the political violence of republicanism: an ideology that has prolonged the pain of a nation that has already suffered too much.

An Owen goal
Why is the normally sensible David Owen joining in the unhappy game of psychoanalysing Tony Blair? His latest book puts the former Prime Minister on the couch, just as another ex-Labour MP, Leo Abse, did, and New Statesman tried to, all of them convinced that wanting to get rid of dictators was somehow a pathological disorder. Just as Michael Burleigh's reviewer reveals more about himself than the book under review with his comments on Ireland, so I fear all these writers say more about their judgment than Tony Blair's in considering a desire to end tyranny a psychological flaw.

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