Introducing Our Latest Columnist Mandy Katz

Editor’s Note: Mandy Katz is a fellow obsessed Anglophile and is going to contribute a regular column on Friday’s – usually with a TGIF theme. Let’s give Mandy and big Anglotopia welcome! Here’s her BIO in her own words.

Mandy Katz lives in a neighborhood called “English Village,” in Maryland, but inhabits a truly English village in her mind, the source of AngloFiles, her blog.

It wasn’t always like that. As a New Jersey teenager, Mandy discovered

Freddie Laker, the Eurailpass and backpacking. She managed to visit several countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East by the time she turned 24, and spent a year in Hong Kong and China as a freelance writer.

All without setting foot on English soil.

Having dabbled in Hebrew, Japanese and German, and actually learned French and Mandarin, Mandy reasoned, why visit a country where people speak just a mangled version of her native tongue?

Things changed, though, after she married the son of an ex-Londoner. Her mother-in-law may have cleaved to American wonders like minivans and the Redskins, but Mandy went the other way, after family visits took her to Frome and Bromsgrove, Dudley and Sudbury-on-Thames. When business led to London in 1999, she homesteaded with her husband and three young kids in a Hyde Park flat for two months and never got over leaving.

Now every trip she takes seems to go a U.K. airport. Armchair travel and web-surfing, too, lead Mandy to all things British – news, art, books and food. It’s all fodder for Anglofiles and her @Anglofilia tweets.

Yes, Mandy’s a fan, but a bemused critic, too. In short, she is …

When not immersed in AngloFiles, Mandy writes regularly for the New York Times and is a senior editor at Moment magazine.