Between 1979 and 1991, in what are sometimes referred to as the Reagan-Thatcher years, Schlesinger directed four films that delve deeply into questions of national identity: Yanks (1979), The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), both of which were Hollywood productions, and two highly acclaimed short films made for British television, An Englishman Abroad (1983) and A Question of Attribution (1991). Each of these films is based on historical fact, reminding us that Schlesinger learned his craft in the late fifties making documentary films for the BBC. Yanks is set during the Second World War in a town in Northern England where American soldiers are stationed; it depicts the relationships that develop between the soldiers and the local population. The Falcon and the Snowman concerns two American men, Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee, who sell US security secrets to the Soviet Union in the mid-seventies; and the two BBC films, both of which are based on plays by Alan Bennett, are about members of the notorious spy ring known as the Cambridge Five. An Englishman Abroad concerns Guy Burgess, who defected to the Soviet Union in the early fifties, and A Question of Attribution is about the art historian Anthony Blunt, whose espionage during the Cold War became known to the public in 1979.

In Conversations with John Schlesinger, Buruma makes it clear that the director was deeply interested in the subject of all four of these films. The characters and plots may have come from material written by others, but his selection of them was driven by personal interest, and his transformations of them into films were undertaken within a particular set of moral questions that were uniquely his own. Schlesinger's ambivalence toward ideas of national identity and allegiance is strongly felt in the last three of the films, but Yanks, in which sentiment plays a more obvious role than in the others, is essential to understanding their political perspective.