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Personally I would attempt to avoid stressing a pernicious division between the cultural and commercial purposes of cinema. It is, I think, a mistake to divorce the two and imagine all cinema as a simple binary of either profitable or valuable. To borrow your literary allusion, it is easy to forget that many great books were written as much for financial gain as artistic inspiration; Dostoyevsky wrote both “Crime & Punishment” and “The Gambler” simultaneously in order to pay his gambling debts.

Similarly I think too often we mistake the outcome for the inspiration. Nationalism is not inherent to artistic creation. You list great writers who wrote defining texts about the world that surrounded them. If Ginsberg had been a Russian, Orwell and American and Bulgakov English then it is hard to imagine that none of them would have not still achieved what they did. England may well have made Graham Green the writer he was but it wasn’t being English that made him a writer.

Neither is Nationalism central to the audience’s enjoyment. The affection I feel towards Hamlet is no different to that I feel towards the Cherry Orchard or Casablanca. The fact that I was born closer to the home of the author of one doesn’t make it more mine than the others. Flags get draped over an artist’s work but the love of country that is bound up in something is not a competitive nationalism but an appreciation of a national spirit; you don’t have to be a Russian to love Checkov. It seems to help to not be English in order to love Richard Curtis.

By letting unnecessary conflicts narrow the terms with which we discuss the sort of cinema we would wish our work to form a part of we ruin our best chance of creating something truly compelling. Commercial vs Cultural, Art House vs Mainstream, the need for British cinema to compete with Hollywood or Europe – these are all distractions. Setting out to make films that are “more British” or “more successful” is to misunderstand the reasons why people go to the cinema.

How do we as English speakers create valid a national cinema that deserves a place in world cinema? I expect the best first step will be to stop trying. After all, Dostoyevsky wasn’t trying to create a uniquely Russian literature which would place his country on the world stage, he was just trying to pay his bills. For too long we’ve not been thinking about paying bills, just about trying to look like we could.