To a degree almost unimaginable for today’s novelists, Kerouac paid his dues. In 1956, a year before the publication of On the Road, he was to all appearances a broken man. Nobody would take his books — On the Road had been stuck in publishing purgatory for five years, passed back and forth among editors who considered it unmarketable. He had one novel to his name, a commercial failure called The Town and the City, and a rucksack full of eccentric manuscripts. He was 35 years old. 

Kerouac had spent most of the previous decade drifting between San Francisco, New York, Mexico City, and North Carolina, working odd jobs, dodging his ex-wife’s lawyers, wringing cash out of his mother and friends, and writing in a perpetual haze of marijuana, booze, Benzedrine, barbiturates, and morphine. In New York City, in 1953, he had spent a night as Gore Vidal’s lover; a few years later, he was telling friends that Joe McCarthy was right to attack the “Jews and fairies” who controlled the publishing world. To calm his desperation, this Catholic schoolboy studied the teachings of the Buddha, but he had trouble letting go of his ego. He bragged to his friend, the poet Allen Ginsberg, that when literary success finally came, he would go down in history for bringing tens of thousands of Americans to “the Way”. Mostly, he drank.

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Then, seemingly overnight, Kerouac was a star. Encouraged by the electric reception of Ginsberg’s Howl after its first performance in 1955 and by the budding media interest in the so-called “Beat Generation”, Viking Press released On the Road in September 1957. Except for a positive early review in the New York Times, the critical reception was muted and often hostile. But the book was a sensation among the young readers who were just beginning to form the nucleus of the emerging counterculture. John Lennon read it as an art student in Liverpool; when a friend suggested he change the spelling of his band’s name, then the Beetles, in honour of the American movement, he immediately agreed.

On the Road was a breathless, barely fictionalised account of a series of road trips Kerouac had taken in the late Forties with his friend Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty in the book), a charming, exuberant con-man whose petty-criminal adventures became the basis of Kerouac’s narrative. The prose itself was full of speed, in both senses — reading it, even today, one gets the feeling of constant, propulsive action, as well as the teeth-grinding mania of all-night binges on amphetamines and coffee. Its politics were obscure, but Kerouac identified with the “beat” — the downtrodden, the hobos and bums and minorities who existed on the fringes of post-war America, free (so he thought) from the drudgery of careers and responsibilities. It was no wonder the hippies identified him as a kindred spirit.

Kerouac, however, resented the comparison. Politics had never been particularly important to him, but he was as much Q-Anon shaman as he was flower child. His own instincts were Catholic-conservative, as befitted the son of devout, petit-bourgeois Quebecois immigrants. He was patriotic, fiercely anti-Communist, frequently anti-Semitic (though many of his closest friends were Jews), and given to bouts of despair over his “lost dream of being a Real American Man”. Although an avid reader, he preferred football to philosophy, and generally mistrusted anything — Marxism, Zen Buddhism — that struck him as overly “critical” or “theoretical”. In a 1945 letter to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, irked by Ginsberg’s teasing at his “goyishe kopf”, or “gentile brain”, lashed out at their whole circle of New York intellectual friends:

“Remember that the earlier part of my life has always been spent in an atmosphere vigorously and directly opposed to this sort of atmosphere. It automatically repels me, thereby causing a great deal of remorse, and disgust. … My whole waking nature tells me that this sort of thing is not in my line. … I’m a son of Jehovah — I advance with trepidation towards the scowling elders, who seem to know about every one of my transgressions, and are going to punish me one way or the other. 

Ginsberg replied, “the ‘remorse’ that you feel is avowedly exteriorized, you are afraid of … external consciousness of your fatal flaws”.

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Ginsberg was perceptive. Where Kerouac’s young fans saw an early prophet of the Age of Aquarius Ginsberg saw the beat-down square, the bourgeois manqué fascinated by the bohemian underworld, yet wracked with guilt over his failure to live up to the traditional values passed down by his parents. Kerouac responded to this dilemma with narcissistic splitting, enthusiastically engaging in all of the “decadent” behaviours he criticised, while constructing elaborate rationalisations as to why he was, despite all outward appearances, different from and better than his friends. He could never really accept he wasn’t the innocent Catholic mama’s boy of his imagination, and lashed out at his friends for leading him into the temptation that was the only real subject of his art.

Even On the Road was a rejection less of “square” life than of the café society of Manhattan, with Neal Cassady as a “sideburned hero of the snowy West”, arriving to rescue Jack from what he described to Ginsberg as “la soiree d’idiocie”. As Kerouac writes early in the novel, “all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean [Neal] just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other”.

Kerouac never really resolved his love-hate relationship with the underground, and so when celebrity came, it was devastating. Traveling to Tangier prior to the publication of On the Road, he had bitterly predicted to his friends that he would “soon become a fad with ‘the mass of middleclass youth’”, according to biographer Ann Charters. He did, and to make matters worse, he was identified in the press with the figure of Dean/Neal, rather than his actual stand-in in the book, the more ambivalent Sal Paradise. Perpetually shy, Kerouac drank himself senseless to deal with the publicity. He was crowned “King of the Beats” and publishers rushed to claim his unpublished novels, but Kerouac believed himself misunderstood. He felt alienated from his young fans, and from the current of critical anti-Americanism he detected in the emerging student movement, the escape from which, for him, had been the whole point of On the Road.

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Scarred by the experience of celebrity and worn out by years of hard living, Kerouac took the money from his sales and moved back in with his mother. In the last decade of his life, he sank into alcoholic paranoia, reading National Review, ranting to friends about Jews and Communists, and writing little of note aside from 1962’s Big Sur, a bleak chronicle of his own mental breakdown dashed out in a 10-day burst of clarity amid bouts of delirium tremens. In 1968, Kerouac appeared on a panel on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line. The novelist, once known for his movie-star good looks, appeared drunk, bloated, and incoherent. A year later he was dead.

For someone with such a huge cultural impact at the time, Kerouac has few contemporary heirs (though plenty of writers, I presume, still drink to excess and sleep around). Sean Thor Conroe, the author of Fuccboi, is said to have tried and failed to walk across America — an eco-conscious spin on Kerouac’s hitchhiking — and alt-lit eminence Tao Lin has urged his readers to Leave Society.

But for all the talk today of an emerging “postwoke” art scene, today’s transgressives are the children of the culture birthed by the Sixties — a synthesis of what Kerouac called, in a 1957 essay, the “supercollosal bureaucratic totalitarian benevolent Big Brother structures” of postwar America with the permissive, therapeutic, spiritual-but-not-religious attitudes of the hippies. Kerouac’s tragedy was that, at the end of the day, he was a traditionalist Canuck whose search for the pure American experience helped usher in a culture that made people like him obsolete. He was both herald and victim of the biggest “vibe shift” of 20th-century America.

Kerouac tried to stay true to his own private rebellion, but it was one that led in circles. Gary Snyder, speaking in 1969, described On the Road as a tale of what happens to the cowboys when there’s nowhere left to roam: “What was intended to be done was that you should step forth into wild space; what you end up doing a hundred years later is driving back and forth in cars as fast as you can.” The only place to go at the end of the road is back where you started. For Kerouac, that was back at his mother’s house in Lowell, Massachusetts, drinking cheap whiskey out of a medicine bottle.

Earlier this month it was reported that Beijing was growing increasingly concerned with British-based private schools monopolising the most talented Chinese pupils.

Britain’s public schools now run 47 campuses across China, educating almost 10,000 pupils, with the total number of institutions doubling in just two years, and pupil increasing by 10% in just one.

Wellington – at £41,580-a-year – operates schools in Tianjin, Shanghai and Hangzhou, while the even more expensive Dulwich College has two campuses in Shanghai, plus two more in Beijing and Suzhou.

In total there are almost 25,000 non-British students at overseas British schools, and it has become such an industry that the prestigious teacher-recruiting company Gabbitas has shifted its core business to tutoring pupils for independent school entrance, with offices in Russia, Japan and South Korea, as well as three in China. Large numbers of Chinese pupils are also educated in Britain, enough that boarding schools limit the number of Chinese children in each house.

Britain’s schools are an export market worth £1billion a year, hardly surprising when the private system has continued to maintain its place as the best in the world, even during the 1970s and 80s when the state system was at its worst. And yet Chinese parents often talk of their admiration not just for the education system but Britain and its culture.

Britain’s education industry is a key part of what’s referred to as “soft power”, national strength derived from cultural influence, but it is also a beneficiary of it, taking advantage of a particular idea of Britain and Britishness that attracts people from around the world.

The origin of this soft power runs deep. The ethos of the British public school owes much to Thomas Arnold, the early 19th century reformer who introduced the prefect system and made public schools far more civilised. But Arnold, a devout Christian whose son Matthew went on to write Dover Beach, also did much to create the English gentleman (before Arnold, public schools were violent in a way that now seems comically absurd, with regular riots in which troops had to be called in, and regular firearms-related antics).

The English gentleman was an ideal but it had tangible, real-world effects, contributing in part to the huge change in British behaviour between 1850-1950, when a very violent and boorish country became famously gentle; as Orwell observed, “in no country inhabited by white men is easier to shove people off the pavement”.

Such was the power of the this idea that the rising middle class around the world aped British mores, most noticeably in the adoption of the suit as the global dress – because that was how a gentleman dressed. It helped create an idea of Englishness, an attractive brand that the country’s institutions continue to benefit from.

But soft power is much older even than the Victorians. Long before disputes over burgundy and blue, UK passports weren’t even in English but in French, the language of high culture and diplomacy. This was not just a reflection of historic French military domination, but the leading position of Paris University in the Middle Ages. During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the likes of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great graced the Sorbonne, one-third of students there were English, who were even then stereotyped as drunks.

Although the Norman Conquest had a huge impact on our language, the great bulk of French loan words in English arrived much later, in the 13th and 14th centuries, a result of French cultural domination. (Whether the spread of their culture was of any benefit to your average French person is a matter of debate.)

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Today British soft power is likewise strengthened by our university system, which educates as many world leaders as the United States, but this probably has less influence than the country’s cultural capital, and in particular its stories.

For most outsiders, our island story has little to do with the things a nation tells about itself – usually victories in battle – but the narratives we tell; when people think of Britain they immerse themselves in Lord of the Rings, Wind in the Willows, the Narnia tales, James Bond or Paddington.

Places tangibly benefit from the stories attached to them; Edinburgh’s rich literary history aides its ability to draw in not just tourists but the talented people who allow it to compete globally. Dublin will live off the cultural royalties of James Joyce long after the family have stopped getting the cheques from Dubliners. Birmingham even benefits from Peaky Blinders tourism. Some stories grow so powerful that they come to define a country; Walter Scott’s novels didn’t just help Scottish tourism but helped to create the very idea of Scotland. Were it to leave the UK and go it alone, the country would still very much depend on the romantic legacy Scott left it.

Soft power matters more today because global elites are far more mobile, and freer to choose between a number of potential homes; countries are in competition to attract this small pool of talent, who all speak the same global language and could easily settle in any of 20 or 30 global cities. London has an advantage in that wealthy foreigners have a certain idea of England.

Again this is nothing new; the Arthurian tales, which became popular in the 12th century among the French-speaking aristocracy of northern France and England, had such an impact on the imagination that aristocrats like Roger Mortimer and Henry III’s brother Richard ended up spending vast amounts on building castles in the Celtic lands of Wales and Cornwall to indulge their own Arthurian fantasies, stories converting into currency for the local economy.

Stories are central to the human psyche, and for Britain there is one like no other when it comes to drawing people to these shores. When a writer from Times Higher Education visited Durham University and asked Chinese students why they had chosen the city, the young people all gave the same response, one that will be wearily predictable to parents across the land: “Harry Potter”.

Durham featured in the film series and its architecture and location, accessed by King’s Cross, gives it some of that cash-convertible Potter magic. Realising this potential, and with universities as competitive as cities in trying to attract global talent, the college has even taken to sorting its students into Hogwarts houses.

Harry Potter, it’s fair to say, is more than just a book; its fans – my daughters among them – treat it more akin to a religion, and it seriously influences their worldview and even politics.

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And the world J.K. Rowling created speaks hugely about the modern British brand. It is a curious mixture of progressive political values – Gryffindor v Slytherin is a thinly disguised conflict between liberals and reactionaries – and very traditional aesthetic styles, in particular its Gothic-Romanesque hybrid boarding school (not to mention the conservative idea of a boy chosen not for any great meritocratic abilities but who his parents were). Rowling’s vision is very much of the current year, but it certainly owes something to Arnold, that deeply ingrained idea of gentleness.

In this world tolerance is a key virtue, as much as “love” is for Pauline Christianity, reflecting its centrality to modern-day British culture. Indeed, when Tony Blair’s government started talking about “British values” in the 2000s as something to be taught to an increasingly fractured society, “tolerance” was presented as something inescapably British, as if other nations define themselves by their intolerance.

This modern idea of Britishness is very much seen in films like Paddington 2 or the revamped Mary Poppins, which curiously combine modern social mores – “it’s okay to be different” – with very traditional architecture and visual aesthetics. The Notting Hill of Paddington, with evenly-distributed ethnic groups and social classes living side by side in a friendly urban environment, is obviously a charming fantasy, and one that particularly appeals to 21st century Britain’s Bobo ruling class.

Yet Britishness now transcends geography, so much so that it can be replicated in Changzhou or Chengdu. This is something new, as for most people historically a country is defined by place, patriotism being a love of a particular spot, reflecting the Greek etymolgy of patri, “father land”. This is why the inherently conservative country music so readily fixes on a particular town or space, as do pretty much all folk traditions.

For those of a more progressive worldview, however, a nation is also an ideal, the land being merely the body beyond which there is a “soul” of a nation. This is certainly true of Britishness, which has developed into something far more than a physical country, let alone an ethnic group. Britishness has become a sort of idea – and a very profitable one at that.

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Today British values are intimately tied up with liberalism, the country being one of the most proselytising about gay rights, literally flying the flag from its embassies. Just as British national identity is in decline at home, facing both Scottish and English nationalism and – more damaging still – a university-educated middle class who regard national feeling as déclassé (something they’ve made quite clear since June 2016), so it has gained new life as sort of global ideology, inseparable from progressive values of tolerance. Britain has lost the Raj and all the flags have come down, but it has gained a spiritual empire.

History once again provides a template. After Rome fell it was still able to project its cultural values, worldview and language across most of Europe through the Roman spiritual empire, or as it’s better known, the Catholic Church. Christianity was relatively new to Rome by the fall of the western empire, and to a third century Roman it would have been as incomprehensible as the “British values” of gay marriage and trans rights would have been to our great-grandparents; yet the liberal doctrine of tolerance has become as intertwined with Britishness as Catholicism came to be with Rome.

We certainly benefit from the stories that have come to be associated with these islands, just as the Eternal City has done through the ages. While Game of Thrones is worth £200m a year to Northern Ireland, Harry Potter’s value to the UK economy is incalculable, but Rowling has arguably put more cash into the British treasury than anyone in history.

Perhaps it’s something we should be more aggressively profiting from; we could redesign Luton or Stansted Airport to look like Hogwarts and divert the trains so that visitors came into King’s Cross platform 9 or 10. Birmingham could certainly take more advantage of its Tolkien connections, not to mention the obvious trick of renaming its airport after Shakespeare.

Would that be to make England an amusement park? Perhaps. In Julian Barnes’s novel England, England an entrepreneur turns the Isle of Wight into a sort of miniature fantasy England, complete with recreations of the Battle of Britain and a scale model of Buckingham Palace; he even persuades the king to move there, but then the British royal family is, after all, ersatz anyway.

In the story the replica proves so successful that the Isle of Wight becomes a thriving independent state, while the rest of the country – Old England – turns into a depopulated hell. As one of the characters explains, people prefer the fake to the original these days; but then perhaps they always have. As T.S Eliot observed, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”.