The UK only has a single author, poet and source of inspiration for period movies: Shakespeare. Theatres only run musicals and Shakespeare. British litterature is either Harry Potter or Shakespeare. And if a Brit must quote a classic, it must be Shakespeare.
Literature is not what the English lack!
But it does.
Maybe it's just my poor schooling but the only author we ever /had/ to read was Shakespeare, my mother introduced me to Orwell, my grandfather to Dickens.
The schools only ever introduced Shakespear, like he was the only notable author in the last thousand years.
and to be fair, it was Warwickshire.
Just in case anyone is still around from those days that was Park Senior High School, Swindon, Wilts, 1970-1974. The more I hear of other people's schooling the more grateful I am for the schools I went to
Some of the books which most influenced my world view are English; Dawkins (game theory, other writers criticize religion better) and Orwell ("Down and Out in Paris and London", partly also "Animal farm" etc).
You can't generalize millions of people. For a more extreme example of that:
The majority of my intellectual (for lack of a better word) "idols" are probably from USA -- but quite a few people that moved there claims the US average levels of general education is abysmal (except for the specific subject someone studied).
The funniest variant of this was when an old student friend pointed out that his many Americans friends knew more about European history than the average European. (He was active in SCA.)