Now the incoming government of the newly autonomous territory wants to replace it with a monument to the leader of the British independence movement, Harold Drummond. As one Londoner insists, the first Napoleon was “a consummate despot who brutally subjugated this country and had our royal family guillotined”. So “probably best not to continue honoring him”. The citizens who wrangle over cancel culture, it should be said, are all animal-headed figures of various species smartly turned out in the late 19th-century fashions of the Belle Époque. On his column, Napoleon I sports a lion’s head.

Welcome to the world of Grandville. Between 2009 and 2017, Bryan Talbot — a former comics artist acclaimed for visually and verbally ingenious graphic fictions such as Alice in Sunderland — published five “anthropomorphic steampunk tales” set in a deliriously witty and inventive alternative past. Beast-headed characters with apt monikers, such as his badger detective Inspector Archie LeBrock, populate twisty thrillers of murder, corruption and conspiracy in high places. They inhabit a Britain subject to French colonial rule over the nearly two centuries since Napoleon’s epoch-making victory at Waterloo.

Steam and gas technology have generated a civilization of advanced, but electricity-free, amenities, from “voicepipes” for instant communication to high-speed air services by dirigible and that engineering marvel, the cross-Channel rail bridge. The language of “Grandville” — Paris, seat of the world-spanning French Empire — has supplanted English except in backward rural districts. There the “old tongue” of the obscure, almost-forgotten playwright Shakespeare persists. Although Talbot’s animals often banter in thickest Cockney and even (in one scene set in a transvestite bar) the venerable gay argot Polari, the notices and posters around them remind us that, in the stories’ world, they’re all speaking French. As one holiday ad proclaims: Skegness est tellement vivifiant!

After a bitter struggle for autonomy pursued both through mass strikes and civil disobedience, and terrorist outrages perpetrated by the “Angry Brigade”, the imperial authorities in Grandville have finally granted self-government to the restive Brits. Even the infamous General Pierre Woolf is dead. The lupine “dictator of Britain”, he ruled the colony with an iron paw and inflicted carnage on protestors in the Brick Lane Massacre. But the ruthless old elites — French or native-born — will not go quietly. A succession of dastardly plots, stunts and atrocities attempt to thwart British self-government. This backlash calls for all the investigative skills of the staunchly proletarian Detective-Inspector LeBrock and his shrewd patrician sidekick, Detective-Sergeant Roderick Ratzi.

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The action of the five Grandville volumes took place shortly after the achievement of a fragile self-rule in Britain. Now Talbot has produced a kind of prequel, or origin story. Just published, The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor backtracks two decades to the year of independence. Its protagonist, DI Hawksmoor, is a legend among the coppers at the Cour d’Écosse. A saturnine eagle-headed sleuth, armed with Sherlock Holmes-like deerstalker and pipe, he will go on to become LeBrock’s admired mentor and model. The suspicious “suicide” in a Suffolk field of Stamford’s stuffy and rigid civil servant brother (one of many nods to Arthur Conan Doyle) puts our aquiline investigator on the trail of low-life killers (notably the “Butcher of Shoreditch”) and upper-class conspirators. He uncovers a fatal web of corruption around the construction of the neo-Gothic British Parliament at Westminster. But should Hawksmoor trust the ferocious DCI Doberman of Special Branch, let alone his new assistant DS Adrian Rowe, a slick little deer who pretends to come from Kingston nick but speaks with “that distinctive disdainful nasal burr common to Eton alumni”? Even in this anthropomorphic alternate universe, some things never change. Elsewhere, a punter bets 10 francs on Arsenal trouncing Millwall although “Arsenal ain’t won a major pétanque tournament for three years”.

Beyond the plentiful gags and myriad artistic and literary allusions — quotes from Shakespeare, Milton and Byron, visual evocations of Gustave Doré’s vistas of the London slums or Sidney Paget’s original Sherlock Holmes illustrations — Talbot builds his parallel world with terrific audacity and dexterity. What his introduction calls the “historically divergent realm” of Grandville has both the internal logic and the imaginative reach of the boldest fantasy landscapes.

Born in Wigan, Talbot had risen through the hard school of comics illustration for DC Comics, 2000 A.D. and other series. He published his first major graphic novel, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, in 1982. Over a decade later, The Tale of One Bad Rat — with its Beatrix Potter-style story of surviving child abuse — indicated that his formal ambitions for the “pictorial narrative” had few limits. If the Lewis Carroll-inspired Alice in Sunderland confirmed his gifts, later collaborations with his wife Mary M Talbot took them in fresh directions. Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, is a hybrid memoir-biography that combines two father-daughter relationships: that of Mary Talbot with her academic father, and James Joyce with the troubled Lucia.

Yet if Talbot has traveled a long way from the playground escapades of Beano and Dandy, he always salutes the comics wizards who pioneered his storytelling art. Background homages to Leo Baxendale, Talbot’s inspirational friend and the creator of the Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx, jostle with deftly executed pastiches of Manet, Millais, Mucha, and a score of other artists in the frames and full-page panels of the Grandville books. Talbot the art-history buff even invents a chicken-headed abstract expressionist painter named — Jackson Pollo. Fiercely proud of his working-class roots and secure in his old-school radicalism, he might not appreciate being dubbed the Tom Stoppard of the British graphic novel. Still, this sophisticated and encyclopedic wit, allied to a command of multiple narrative genres, make the comparison far from absurd. And LeBrock does indeed have an admiring canine colleague called Inspector Hound.

The Grandville world of intelligent beasts in a steampunk Napoleonic Britain began when Talbot discovered the satirical anthropomorphic cartoons of an early 19th-century French illustrator, Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard. They triggered a sort of epiphany. “In a moment of genius,” reports Talbot’s publisher Dan Franklin in an afterword to the new story, “Bryan suddenly saw a world.”

The imagination of alternative pasts has flourished for centuries in the arenas of fiction, illustration and (not least) history itself. These days, however, the entire “counterfactual” domain struggles to escape from interminable “what-if-the Nazis-won” accounts of an alternative Second World War. In his (distinctly skeptical) book about the genre and its uses, Altered Pasts, the historian Richard J.Evans traces several generations of “victorious Hitler” speculations in fiction, film and historical writing. Landmarks such as Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland rise above a terrain crowded over decades with rampant Nazis.

Evans casts a baleful eye on counterfactual tales in whatever guise, whether they take the form of Wishful Thinking or Awful Warning. He sees the invention of parallel pasts as an essentially reactionary genre. It has proliferated because “the concept of progress… took a hard knock” as deterministic visions of an inevitable rosy future — whether Marxist or liberal — lost their allure. It turns out that a sort of Left-Right split governs historians’ discussion of counterfactual narratives. In the other camp, Niall Ferguson — above all in the theoretical introduction to his edited collection of alt-history essays, Virtual History — celebrates the return of chance and uncertainty in thinking about the past. Ferguson advocates a “chaotic” conception of history: one that recognizes complex patterns behind events but also the role of accidents, disruptions and reversals. Such an outlook permits writers to “reconcile the notions of causation and contingency”. Imagine things otherwise and you restore freedom to the past, and to its actors. So conjectural speculation can amount to more than a “parlor game”, or donnish diversion.

Bryan Talbot might strike both Evans and Ferguson as an anomaly: a Left-wing spinner of counterfactual stories (albeit with animal heads) motivated by neither nostalgic longing nor dystopian dread. Narratives that spin off from Bonaparte’s imaginary but perfectly possible triumph at Waterloo themselves have a long history; the idea drives a famous, wistful passage of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Evans explains that in 1836 Louis Geoffroy — an adopted son of the Emperor himself — wrote a treatise that imagined Napoleon’s conquest of the world: he smashes the British army at the decisive Battle of Cambridge after landing his forces at Great Yarmouth. And a 1907 essay by G.M. Trevelyan, doyen of progress-worshipping Whig historians, spelled out the dire future of British decline that would have followed from Wellington’s defeat in 1815.

The Grandville premise, of long-term French imperial mastery, yielding gradually to home rule, allows Talbot to map (say) the Irish or Indian colonial experience onto British society. The upper crust does very nicely, thank you, with a Frenchified elite not that different — animal identities apart — from their actual counterparts in the era of pea-soupers, hansom cabs, and discreet plush bordellos for the gentry. (That matronly hippo Madame Riverhorse runs a famous house.) As for the plebs, Talbot portrays many varieties of collaboration and resistance, from the moderate nationalism of Harold Drummond (a bulldog, naturally) and his socialists to the terror attacks of the Angry Brigade. Drummond denounces them as “xenophobic fanatics” but the hard-line nationalist tabloids love them, “cynically whipping up hatred of the French for their own profit”. Time and again, the Grandville stories pluck features from our own world and wittily transfer them to its upside-down, inside-out milieu. We even meet a piscine avatar of the author himself: one “Byron Turbot”, an odd fish who ghost-writes “sixty-centime dreadful” true-crime thrillers.

It may seem bizarre to look for enlightenment in the debate over counterfactual stories to a set of comic-book adventures with a cast of talking animals set in a fantasy mock-Victorian Britain. But the Grandville books both imagine a plausible conjectural history — the consequences of a Napoleonic victory — and show how social and technological forces might still have led to a London (and Paris) similar in key aspects to the world we know. And crucially, if also comically, Talbot’s animal kingdom presents a thoroughly colonized Britain with a credible spread of attitudes to the Bonapartes’ dynastic rule: from eager collaboration through grumbling complicity to violent revolt. Counterfactual history has seldom painted as rich an alternative past as Talbot’s — and never a wittier one. Reverse engineered chronology aside, the visual gags on every page delight. Who’s that sad, tipsy ursine figure we spot swigging from a bottle in the street outside the Cour d’Écosse? Bonsoir, Paddington.

The Black Adder, as it was originally titled, is 40 years old this week, first airing on 15 June 1983. After a shaky start, it would run for four series, though in its day it was never as popular as the other great historical comedy of the decade, ’Allo ’Allo. But its 24 episodes, spread across four time periods, have secured a cherished place in the British TV pantheon: second greatest sitcom ever, according to a 2004 BBC poll of the public; 16th greatest programme ever made, according to the British Film Institute in 2000.

At the time, it wasn’t considered to be as controversial as Gove suggests, overshadowed by far noisier arguments about Britain’s history. A few months before Blackadder was first broadcast, it had been suggested to Margaret Thatcher that what she believed in were essentially “Victorian values” — and she leapt at the phrase with great enthusiasm. When she was asked to identify which bits of the 19th century she particularly approved of, she ran through the standard list — thrift, charity, personal responsibility — and added “the British Empire that took both freedom and the rule of law to countries that would never have known it otherwise”.

Her words were carefully chosen at a time when the public interpretation of the Empire was a contentious issue. It was an era of TV dramas such as The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions, of films Heat and Dust, A Passage to India and, biggest of all, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. When it won eight Oscars in 1983, an editorial in the Daily Mirror celebrated the man who “took on the mighty British Empire at the peak of its power and defeated it”. It was, it said, a film that had been made by a “new Britain” that Thatcher didn’t understand, one in which Gandhi was a hero and which “matched the mood of the moment, especially among the young”. (Though Attenborough also claimed that, were he still alive, Gandhi would have voted for the SDP.)

The other reason Blackadder wasn’t seen as controversial was simply that it was a comedy. When the BBC broadcast Alan Bleasdale’s First World War drama The Monocled Mutineer in 1986, its treatment of an Army deserter was met with a barrage of complaints; it was “blatant Left-wing bias”, complained Tory MP Neil Hamilton. Blackadder Goes Forth — the series to which Gove was to take belated exception — attracted no such condemnation in 1989, despite its depiction of the conflict as a futile, idiotic exercise in slaughter. Comedies weren’t taken seriously.

But even as the Right was winning the economic battles in the mid-Eighties, some were beginning to worry that it was losing on the cultural front. John O’Sullivan, later an advisor and speechwriter for Thatcher, wrote of how popular culture had been “invaded” by moral equivalence, undermining the West’s authority in the Cold War. It still wasn’t comedy that concerned him — more the replacement of John Buchan by John Le Carré as the country’s favourite thriller writer — but he was sure that there was a concern here: “This invasion may be more significant than at first appears. Popular culture, after all, is one important way in which national myths and loyalties are transmitted.”

And those myths were important in shaping national identity. The counter-balance was to be found in education, in the teaching of history, where the focus should be on social cohesion and unity. And if the “national myths” that were taught turned out to be not exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then that could be dealt with later on. “We must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism,” O’Sullivan wrote.

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This chimed with the views of Thatcher’s education secretary and mentor, Keith Joseph, who called for schools to foster “through the teaching of history, a sense of pride in one’s country and its achievements”. This was not happening because, as the Daily Mail explained in a 1990 editorial, for 20 years, “Left-wing educationalists have been given a free rein to denigrate this country’s past, to scorn its achievements, to make children almost ashamed to be British”. It was a particularly British phenomenon, argued John Rae, ex-headmaster of Westminster School: every American or French child learned about their respective revolution, but the same was not true in Britain of the Glorious Revolution. There was too much Peace Studies, not enough Civil War. Joseph’s successor as education secretary, Kenneth Baker, was shocked to discover that more children could tell the difference between a brontosaurus and a tyrannosaurus than could distinguish Charles I and Oliver Cromwell.

It was Baker who supplied the supposed solution: the national curriculum, a centrally approved agenda that would specify what was to be taught in primary and secondary schools. At its core, said Baker, should be “the history of Britain, the record of its past and, in particular, its political, constitutional and cultural heritage”. Or, in the words of a delegate to the National Union of Teachers conference, “the purpose of the national curriculum is to sell the ideas of present-day capitalist society, market values, profit, the beauty and joys of the British Empire”. As John McGregor, the next Tory education secretary, pointed out wearily: “History is by far the most political subject.”

The national curriculum was introduced in 1989 and was intended to be a decisive moment in reversing the advances made by the Left. You may have noticed, however, that it didn’t prove to be the last word in the debate. A 2021 Daily Mail editorial was still using exactly the same language when denouncing “those who love to denigrate this country’s history”. On the other hand, Sathnam Sanghera told a literary festival this week: “No country is as far behind in talking honestly about Empire than Britain.”

Much of the dispute comes down to the issue of what history is for. Sometime historian and erstwhile Labour MP Tristram Hunt once complained that “history on television is in danger of telling comforting stories about ourselves to ourselves, rather than confronting the past”. He was probably right — but there remained the question of whether that’s such a bad thing. Maybe people prefer comfort to confrontation. There’s a huge public appetite for television drama covering a wide spectrum of British history, from Wolf Hall and The Tudors, through Victoria and Downton Abbey, to The Crown and Call the Midwife. It’s possible to enjoy, to be engaged and stimulated, even to learn without having to confront.

In any event, confronting the past doesn’t necessarily bring any clarity. When an opinion poll in January 2016 asked how people saw the British Empire, 44% said it was something to be proud of, 21% said something to be ashamed of. When the same question was asked in August 2020 — at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests — both figures had fallen significantly, with the largest group now the 40% (nearly doubled since 2016) who couldn’t say whether they were proud or ashamed.

Maybe there’s a parallel between O’Sullivan’s “we must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism” and how most of us understand, say, physics. I’m aware, in an abstract, ill-informed sort of way, that Newtonian mechanics don’t apply at a sub-atomic level or when approaching the speed of light, but it doesn’t really matter to me; I find Newton perfectly sufficient in my life. I “know” — because I’ve been told — that the atoms making up the table at which I’m sat are mostly empty space, but I can still work on the assumption that it’s a solid surface.

I don’t feel the need to confront my simplistic understanding of gravity; rather, the predictability of matter is comforting in its certainty, even if it’s not the whole picture. Likewise, national myths. There’s a point to them, a usefulness in a common identity. Social cohesion is manifestly a good thing, and so too is patriotism.

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The stories that comprise that mythology change, of course (despite the slow-thinking likes of Otto English furiously tilting at windmills that were left derelict four decades ago). Michael Gove recognised that when he complained about the “myths which have grown up” around the First World War, and called for greater nuance in our understanding. He was right: the assumptions that underpinned Blackadder Goes Forth were crude and narrow. But that interpretation of the conflict — “a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”, as Gove summarised it — is now part of the national mythology.

Even if it sometimes feels as though there’s been a 40-year stalemate in the culture war to end all war, myths evolve. And that process is influenced more by TV such as Blackadder than by the national curriculum. Which is one in the eye for Conservatives — or, as Edmund Blackadder called them, “fat Tory landowners who get made MPs when they reach a certain weight”.

“All life is an experiment,” Emerson proclaimed. “The more experiments you make the better.” Is there a lesson there for Gareth Southgate? Or should the England boss stick with the tried and trusted, and resort to his usual back five against the bigger teams? Perhaps the only answer is to trust his own judgement. For “nothing,” Emerson also said, “can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

I’m pretty confident that nobody else has ever kicked off a preview of an England World Cup game with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but that’s just because we don’t often play the United States. There may have been a match in 2010, but it was so drab that I’ve long since forgotten it; and obviously World Cups before 1966 don’t count.

But as the hours tick down until tonight’s clash with the USA, Emerson’s legacy still looms large. For more than anybody else in his country’s history, it was the comically named Waldo who insisted that his countrymen emerge from the shadow of the Old World and create their own distinct identity, not simply as traitors and tax dodgers, but as unrepentantly non-British Americans.

The occasion was a speech to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society on 31 August 1837, entitled “The American Scholar”. And as Waldo told his listeners, it was time to throw off the shackles of the past. In future, Americans must take their cue from the natural wonders of their vast continent, not the dry, desiccated clichés they found in European libraries. The true American, Waldo said, should rely on himself: to stand tall, he must stand alone. “We will walk on our own feet,” he said grandly: “we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.” Some inspiring words there, perhaps, for the catchily named USMNT.

Throwing off the Old World has been an American preoccupation from the very beginning. The first pilgrims sailed west to escape what they saw as the sinful corruption of James I’s England, and you need only glance at the world’s worst newspaper to see that their descendants’ obsession with English wickedness is as fervent as ever. Even though more than two centuries have passed since the American colonists put financial self-interest above their duty to king and country, you can still detect traces of the old resentments.

You can see them in the frequent laments that Hollywood studios are employing too many British actors — even black British actors. You can see them in, say, the New York Times’s coverage of London’s restaurant scene (“Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton”). You can see it, too, in the same paper’s complaints that too many “Britishisms” are entering American English: “Crikey, Britishisms are everywhere. Call it Anglocreep. Call it annoying.” They’re calling us annoying? Seriously?

Even on the football pitch — sorry, “soccer field” — many Americans will tell you that this fixture matters more than any other. “For any American player, this matchup is unique,” the former US World Cup striker Eric Wynalda wrote a few days ago. “While playing Brazil and Argentina is how you measure yourself as a country, playing England always feels personal.” When he played England in 1993, there was, he recalled, “an element of jealousy. The England players were rich, they had a big league and great fan support. They were cocky as hell. We wanted to be them, but in our own way. I think that still exists.” As it happens, Wynalda and co. won that day. Still, it was only a friendly.

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Alas, in recent years, as even the most John Bullish have to admit, there haven’t been many cultural arenas in which we can feel smugly superior to our American cousins. Ever since the United States overtook Britain economically at the end of the 19th century — an inevitability given their geographical advantages, so that doesn’t really count as a win either — the boot has been firmly on the other foot. As early as 1914 the young T. S. Eliot, speaking in a debate at Merton College, Oxford, reminded his listeners “how much they owed to Amurrican culcher in the drayma (including the movies) in music, in the cocktail, and in the dance”. (These are Eliot’s own spellings. Again, they call us annoying?)

But it was in the decade after the First World War that the threat of Americanisation really loomed large. Britain was a country in shell shock: grey, weary, disillusioned and divided. The United States, on the other hand, was the land of ragtime and jazz, fizzing with excitement. “I am counting the days till I can get away and have decided from now on to live in America,” wrote P. G. Wodehouse in 1923. There was, he said, something “dead and depressing about London… all I want to do is to get back and hear the American language again.”

Wodehouse was bound for Hollywood, which was no accident. With a far bigger domestic market, an American film in the early Twenties typically made ten times more money than its British equivalent, which inevitably meant larger budgets. Even in 1925, some 95% of all film tickets sold in Britain were for American pictures.

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And when, two years later, Al Jolson’s film The Jazz Singer ushered in the age of the talkies, Fleet Street’s finest wailed in despair. The terrible truth, lamented the Daily Express, was that “the bulk of our picture-goers are Americanised to an extent that makes them regard a British film as a foreign film… They go to see American stars; they have been brought up on American publicity. They talk America, think America, and dream America. We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens.”

In the decades that followed, the traffic flowed only one way. When the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941 — two years late, as true patriots will never tire of pointing out — it rapidly became the senior Allied partner. Sent to North Africa to liaise with General Eisenhower, the young Harold Macmillan predicted that his compatriots’ future lay in being “Greeks in this American empire”, and hoped they might be able to mastermind things from the shadows, “as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”. The Greeks in question were slaves, so this wasn’t a very enticing analogy. In any case, the Americans had no intention of allowing their former masters to “run” them. Britain would learn that lesson at Suez.

By the time Macmillan became prime minister in January 1957, Americanisation seemed unstoppable, epitomised by everything from Bill Haley and Elvis Presley to hamburgers and teenagers. When you read one contemporary list of outlandish Americanisms — “barbecued chickens rotating on their spits in the shop windows… parking meters… bowling alleys, glass-skyscrapers, flying saucers” — the surprising thing is that so many of them were American. Perhaps that tells its own story. “I must say,” muses Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, “it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age — unless you’re an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.”

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Then came a genuine turning point. Before 7 February 1964, the date the Beatles landed in New York, only two other British acts, Acker Bilk and the Tornados, had held the Billboard number one spot, both with instrumentals. But with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the picture changed.

In the next two years, British acts hogged the top spot for no fewer than 52 weeks, from Manfred Mann, Petula Clark and the Dave Clark Five to Herman’s Hermits, the Troggs and the Rolling Stones. The obvious irony is that they often played American music. But that didn’t make them any less British. “What made us first want to go to America and conquer it was being English,” the Who’s Pete Townshend said later. “We didn’t care a monkey’s about the American dream.”

For the next 40 years or so, the cultural relationship felt like a genuine joint enterprise. Sheer size meant the United States was always the bigger partner, but there were enough British Oscar winners, enough British number ones, to suggest that it wasn’t entirely one-way. At the height of the so-called Second British Invasion, between 1983 and 1986, British acts actually did even better than 20 years earlier, twice accounting for exactly half of all the places in the Top 40.

Even politically, British politicians could pretend, at least, that they stood as tall as their American contemporaries. Just read the hilarious transcript of Margaret Thatcher’s exchange with Ronald Reagan after British troops had landed on the Falkland Islands. Reagan suggests offering a ceasefire; she is having none of it. As the exchange goes on, Reagan’s contributions dwindle to “Margaret, I –” and ‘Yes, well —”, while hers get ever longer and more hectoring. True, he got his own back in Grenada a year later. But in Britain we’ve all forgotten about that, so again it doesn’t count.

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Since then, however, there’s been a seismic technological shift, greater even than the rise of the cinema. And although we don’t really talk about Americanisation anymore, that’s surely because, since the rise of social media, we’ve become so Americanised that we no longer even notice it. Yet once you do start to notice it, you never stop. And yes, there’s a risk of sounding like the reincarnation of Lord Salisbury, but who cares?

So here we go. When did self-hating Britons start saying “mac ‘n’ cheese” instead of “macaroni cheese”? Why do 25-year-old publishers think “cliché” is an adjective? Why are there no medical systems on earth other than our beloved, sacred NHS and the cruel American private healthcare firms? Why does the BBC send 6,000 people to report on a senatorial election in Georgia but only two men and a dog to cover the federal elections in Germany?

Who decided that schoolchildren in Leamington Spa should care about Rosa Parks? Why did thousands of people take to the streets in Britain about the killing of a single black man in Minneapolis, when barely a handful bother to protest the sack of Mariupol or the incarceration of the Uyghurs? And why on earth, when a couple of half-crazed American academics announce that we must cancel the term Anglo-Saxon to describe Alfred the Great and Athelstan because it’s a racist “dog whistle” for “white, Western superiority”, do so many British historians fall limply into line?

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There’s only one answer to all this — and in an age that prizes victimhood above all else, what a richly satisfying answer it is. For it’s time we Britons recognised ourselves for what we are: a cruelly oppressed people, so brutalised by our imperial overlords that we don’t realise how badly we’ve been treated. Our idioms, our customs, even our cooking have been ruthlessly erased from history, our pies and puddings driven out by chicken wings and cheeseburgers, and we haven’t even noticed. And now they’re even coming for our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons of sainted memory!

So what would Athelstan, the first king of all England, say? I think we all know the answer to that. He’d say: “Lads, it’s time to decolonise ourselves. Who cares what the Yanks think? But first things first: the World Cup. Let’s give them such a beating they never again claim that macaroni cheese is three words. Come on, England!”

And he would, of course, be right.

Britain being a northwest European kingdom with a very different demographic and historical context to that of the US, the political effects of this were not what our local imitators of American fashions intended, a fact alluded to by the Labour frontbencher Khalid Mahmood when he deplored the loss of Hartlepool with the observation that “the loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world”. 

No wonder, then, that Sadiq Khan, like an arsonist complaining about the growing prevalence of fires in public life, pleaded after his unexpectedly slender victory in London’s mayoral race for an end to the culture war. By making history a political battleground in a fundamentally conservative country more obsessed with its past than any other nation in Western Europe, our America-aping intelligentsia have unwittingly handed the government a ready and easy source of endless political victories. 

Like other divided polities — think of Northern Ireland — we have entered the realm of symbolic politics, where historical memory looms large and where the state possesses a clear advantage. Observe how our newly-Gramscian Conservative government seems set on replacing museum staff to defend one narrative of the nation’s story from assault by another: this is more than an online  “culture war”. Instead, the British state, perceiving a threat to its legitimacy at a time of existential political disorder, is acting as any state would act: by culling challengers to its authority and reasserting the moral validity of its existence.

Yet underlying this war over historical memory, on both sides, is a simplistic understanding of what history actually is. On the one hand, the statue-topplers argue that they are uncovering the dark objective realities of Britain’s colonial or slave-trading past from within an obscuring shroud of national myth-making. On the other, the Government and its supporters assert that they are defending the truth of our island story from the nihilistic and destructive myth-making of race-obsessed radicals. 

Both are right, and both are wrong. All history has a mythic quality, as observed by Foucault in his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France when he noted that “we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce both a justification of power and a reinforcement of power… Like rituals, coronations, funerals, ceremonies and legendary stories, history is an operator of power, an intensifier of power.” What we are observing then, though still only dimly appreciated, is a battle over political power, in which Britain’s history is both the weapon and the field of contest.

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By Aris Roussinos

To understand this interpretation of the historian’s art — for art is what it is — we should turn to the work of the recently-deceased American historian Hayden White. In his 1973 work Metahistory, and later in the essays collected in the 1978 Tropics of Discourse, White took aim at the folk understanding of history as a simple record of events that happened in the past. Using his specialisation in medieval literature, White drew a contrast between the chronicle — a simple, chronological record of events more or less devoid of interpretation — with the historical narrative, encompassing history as we understand it, which is precisely how it sounds: a narrative, a literary construction which assembles an inherently moralising story or myth from the raw data of historical events, a process he termed emplotment.

As White observes: “The historian arranges the events in the chronicle into a hierarchy of significance by assigning events different functions as story elements in such a way as to disclose the formal coherence of a whole set of events considered as a comprehensible process with a discernible beginning, middle, and end.”

As a literary construct — a product of the personal aesthetic judgment and moral worldview of the subset of writers we term historians —and through the conscious or unconscious selection of raw events into an overarching narrative, “history” is  revealed as a literary genre analogous to fiction, which is not to say it is not “true.” As White suggests, historical narratives “succeed in endowing sets of past events with meanings,” as the tropes of fiction unconsciously shape the historian’s art when he sets down to write. The historical narratives he produces follow the form of these fictional narratives — indeed, they depend on them to work.

How does this apply, in practice, to our national culture war? White, deconstructing 19th century historiographies of the French Revolution, distinguishes between a politically “radical” understanding of history as analogous to the Romance, and a more or less conservative one drawing on the tropes of Tragedy. In the first understanding, which characterises the “woke” narrative of Britain’s urgent need to transcend a dark and morally disfigured past, history-as-Romance is “the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ in Christian mythology. It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall.”

More from this author

Is cosmopolitanism our destiny?

By Aris Roussinos

In the conservative, tragic reading of history, by contrast, the historian is concerned with “the resignations of men to the conditions under which they must labor in the world… man cannot change them but must work within them. They set the limits on what may be aspired to and what may be legitimately aimed at” in an imperfect world of frail and fallible human beings.

In the former worldview, the past is a world of torment and oppression which must be erased in the construction of an imminent Utopia; in the latter, the past, though perhaps morally imperfect, simply reflects the bounds of human nature. Man is what he is, and the construction of Utopias is as dangerous as it is fruitless: all we can do is build upon our shared inheritance from the past. We can see this dynamic play out in the United States with the New York Times’s construction of the mythic “1619” narrative centred on America’s essential, founding sin of slavery in opposition to the previously dominant “1776” narrative of America as a promised land of liberty and moral renewal. Neither is true, exactly, just as neither is false: they are merely opposing narratives constructed from the same raw data in pursuit of opposing political projects, differing in emphasis, narrative style and moral worldview. All history is, in this reading, a moral fable about the present.

Viewed in this way, there is a liberating quality to this understanding of history. White claims in The Historical Text as Literary Artefact (1976) that “if historians were to recognise the fic­tive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda” but instead “would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognise as such but honour as the “correct” perception of “the way things really are.” Through this self-awareness, “we should be able to identify the ideological, because it is the fictive, element in our own discourse” just as “we are always able to see the fictive element in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree; we seldom perceive that element in our own prose.” Thus armed with self-awareness, he argues, the contentious work of History can proceed with a greater, more productive detachment. 

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It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

Let’s consider this point further: “we are always able to see the fictive element in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree.” When we apply this insight, as conservatives of one kind or another, to such masterpieces of the modern historian’s craft as “52 Times Britain Was A Bellend,” or to the crop of Twitter academics who pronounce to the world with the now-customary appeal to authority of “Hi, Historian Here!” that actually St George was Turkish or that one or other government pronouncement is just like fascism in the 1930s or that actually Anglo-Saxon England was a multiracial utopia, we are freed from the need to engage these fantasies as historical truths but instead as political statements, new narratives or myths constructed as part of a political project centred on the present. 

It is not worthwhile to state that these claims are not true in a meaningful sense, because they are not meant to be. These are not “truthful” claims about what Britain was but modest literary fictions, political demands about what Britain should be now or in the future citing a mythicised past as a claim to authority.

The purest essence of this trend is the backwards projection of the tropes of late-stage liberalism through all time and space; though it sees itself as an urgent defence against nationalism , through constructing a mythicised past in pursuit of a present day, contested political project, such a worldview is nationalism’s child, not its negation. Indeed, anyone who has studied the starring role of history in the construction of nationalist projects will recognise the ironic parallels: like the classic nationalism of Europe’s 19th century, the anti-national cosmopolitanism of the modern Historian Here is a construct of liberal journalists, academics and schoolteachers, aiming to transcend what they see as a restrictive and oppressive near-past in pursuit of a glorious future, itself prefigured and justified by an idealised distant past. 

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Is it the Tories who are doomed?

By Ed West

For any modern European, ultimately, there is therefore no escaping the tropes of nationalism and the nation-state, even if the aim is to overthrow them: they shape our worldview just as the world of throne and altar shaped that of the medieval mind. Aiming to surpass nationalism, the 21st century cosmopolitan liberal, like the FBPE activist turned-EU nationalist, finds himself reproducing its tropes, entirely unconsciously: whether furiously hunting through ancient bones to find continuity with modern migrant populations like the Ahnenerbe hunting for Germanic ancestors in the steppes of Eastern Europe, or constructing modern political mythologies on the slender records of the dim and distant past.

Returning to the culture war over statues, the adoption of America’s new racialised mythic narrative came at a politically infelicitous time for its partisans, as Labour is now discovering. The British state is threatened by rival peripheral nationalisms, in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and it is not hard to discern the first glimmerings of a British nationalism in a manner that has never yet quite existed. Sturdily independent of foreign rule then distracted by imperial concerns, Britain never experienced the nationalist wave that swept the rest of our home continent in the 19th century — even the high jingoism of the Victorian era spent itself on preventing Russia’s conquest of the Ottoman Empire, rather than focusing on domestic rivals. 

In the nascent British nationalism being forged as a reaction to both separatism and the still-contested relationship with the European Union, many parallels with the classic nationalisms of 19th century Europe can be discerned. Instead of dismissing devolution as merely a failed constitutional experiment, we can perceive an almost irredentist quality, aiming to reunite a unitary people divided by artificial borders. The nationalisms of the periphery have thus birthed a new nationalism of the centre, and the consequent construction of a single British people defined against internal and external rivals in a way that we have never yet quite experienced.

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Why nationalism matters

By Ed West

If this is the case, then as in other nations experiencing a nationalist wave we can expect symbolism and history to become the central matter of politics, in a way that hands great advantage to our current Conservative government. The new politicisation of history is just a taste of what is coming our way. The British state, in Tory hands, will find itself engaged in a war of historical narratives to ensure its own survival. All the affective tools of nationalism and nationhood — the symbolic politics that is the very stuff of nationalism — will be employed to this purpose. The funeral of Prince Philip, a sombre festival of Britishness, was merely an early glimpse of this symbolic realm: we can expect the Queen’s funeral, whenever it comes, and the coronation that follows it, to be profoundly political and fundamentally nationalist spectacles aimed at shoring up the state and the self-identification with it of the British people. 

In this, ironically, we can argue that the government will be more postmodernist than the alleged postmodernist deconstructors of British history: where our soi-disant radicals see themselves as uncovering an objective reality from within the myths of British nationhood, the government will have the need and capacity to construct new-old national myths with all the resources of the state behind it. As others have noted, a postmodernist worldview, whether adopted cynically, or playfully, could be productive territory for a Right-wing political project. We are all postmodernists now, the government as much as its critics: each has the power and will to consciously create mythic narratives for nakedly political ends, yet only one controls the levers of the central state.

Dismissing this dynamic as mere “flag-shagging” is a dangerous trap for Labour — nationalism remains the most powerful political force in Europe, as it has been since the dawn of modernity — still powerful enough, indeed, to break up our country from around us. Once historical narratives, and the emotional bonds of nationhood and solidarity they conjure up, become the central ground of politics, the realm of myth and symbol conquers all. If Labour wants to win power again, it will need to think up better stories for the country to gather around.

Carlisle could stand as proud as any in an audition for the privilege of being the nation’s capital. It played a vital role in the health and wealth of the nation long before some of our more illustrious counterparts were any more than a glint in the Industrial Revolution’s eye. An ancient settlement that later became the largest Roman camp on the Wall, my home city is no stranger to prominence in the socio-political drama of these islands.

Indeed, Carlisle has due heritage: Parliament has been held here before, on at least two occasions. The Great Seal of state was held at Lanercost Priory while Edward I journeyed north to pick a fight with the Scots; alas he could not finish the job, perishing on the windy marshes to the west of Carlisle, giving the city the honour of hosting the coronation of Edward II.

Of course, Edward was here for the same reason as generations before him, and generations after: Carlisle played a key strategic role in the affairs of the entire North. William Rufus seized the city in 1092 to finally extend his father’s Conquest to the north-North. He built a castle on the ancient Roman fort, which was later to become the residence of King David I of the Scots (“Prince of the Cumbrians”), who chose Carlisle as his favoured residence, passing away in the private chapel of the Keep in 1153.

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Why we need a more British capital

By Peter Hitchens

Of course, if you’re Cumbrian, then you’re Cumbrian, and thus slightly different from just English, or Scottish, or even Welsh, but containing hearty dollops of all three (and Irish too – but more of that later). Geographically and historically, Carlisle was part of a Celtic kingdom locked in a tug of war between later Scottish and English overlords. Carlisle’s two dragons on its coat of arms references its Brythonic roots, and wander the Cumbrian countryside map in hand and you’ll soon find more than just the odd clue to its Welsh heritage in its place names and dialect.

Throw in William Wallace (‘wylisc’), a Strathclyder (so Welsh really), and the buried bones of Robert de Brus, father of… yes, you guessed it, and finish off with the centuries old tug of war over Carlisle – at one moment part of Scotland, at another part of England – and Carlisle begins to show itself as a particularly lively theatre of British cosmopolitanism.

It doesn’t stop there. We’re also claiming St Patrick, Old King Cole (Coel Hen – enriching childhoods with memorable ditties from time immemorial), as well as the setting to any firm history that does exist around King Arthur (this is not even controversial), all of whom if not directly from Carlisle are certainly from its hinterland. St Cuthbert visited Carlisle regularly – it had been granted to the diocese of Lindisfarne by Ecgfrith – and St Ninian set out from Carlisle to convert the Picts, while St Mungo – whose legend still shapes the arms of the city of Glasgow – was a Stratchclyder who more than left his mark on field and marsh around Carlisle.

Indeed, one might even make a case that the first steps of the inexorable journey toward a unified Isles took place not far from Carlisle, as Athelstan sought to bring to heel the Northumbrians, the Welsh, the Scots and the Vikings in a little village of henge and earthwork, called Eamont, just outside Penrith.

Carlisle has earned its place at the top table in the gathering places of these lands. Of course, the historical may not convince everyone, so for the doubters let us turn to the practical. Geographically, Carlisle sits at the very nexus of the Isles – it is more or less equidistant between our northernmost reaches and the south coast, a gateway city straddling the old roads north to Glasgow, north-east to Edinburgh, the Wall road east to Newcastle, West to the coalfields and old ports (and nuclear plant) of Maryport and Workington and Whitehaven, and of course south down the ancient A6 to what we might call Down There.

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What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

And remember that Carlisle is the biggest city in England – though admittedly 98% of its land use is rural (most certainly an upgrade from the cramped living of central London). Add to that Carlisle’s long and historic status as a nationally important hub for rail and freight – at one point with a seven rail companies serving its station, second only to London – as well as its long established cultural and historical links with Ireland through constant waves of immigration and trade (Cleator Moor, on the west coast of the county, is affectionately known as “Little Ireland”), and you come to realise that Cumbria has been a lynchpin of UK culture and cohesion for centuries.

Ah, I hear you cry, but could you accommodate the refined tastes of the metropolitan classes that would no doubt descend on Carlisle should we be raised to just prominence? Well, we had the first ever pillar box, we are the home of McVities and make more custard creams than you thought imaginable (that’s the meetings sorted).

Carlisle is also the home of Linton Tweeds, suppliers to Chanel, thus satiating the sartorital demands of the sophisticariat, while we also have the two oldest prizes in horse racing, dating to the 16th century, horses being a key export and cultural signifier of these lands for nigh on 2,000 years. Walter Scott was married here while William Paley – scourge of every A-level philosophy student, and Richard Dawkins – was archdeacon and is buried here, at our cathedral.

One struggles to imagine what more any soul could need.

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Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

There is a serious point to be made too. If there is any case to be made for moving the capital, however temporarily, then it is to break the monopolistic dominance of London on the political and cultural capital of the UK, to renew the democratic covenant with those beyond the M25. Illustrious rivals – Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool – might all have a strong claim for a relocated Parliament, though the politically disruptive pulses flowing through society now are more parochial than that. It is the steely cries of our neglected towns, our isolated regions, our down-at-heel coastal areas, our struggling countryside that is ripping up the status quo. Decamping to another metropolis, particularly a place with a broadly similar sociocultural outlook, would do little more than replicate the problem.

In this sense, Cumbria provides a unique microcosm for those who would seek it out – the post-industrial decline, the struggling coastal areas, the decimation of rural services, the creaking infrastructure. What better place to stand as proxy for a debate we really need to have?

There will be significant downsides of course, and it would take great sacrifice on our part, though I’m sure we would be willing to do so, for the national interest. The increased traffic, the extra noise, the pollution, the jump in house prices, the gentrification, the hipster cereal shops…

On second thoughts, maybe Jon Elledge had a point. Maybe keep it down south after all. Why not try Manchester instead?

“New York, New York (so good they named it twice).” But what about old York – so good they named it over and over again across the millennia? It was Everwic to the Normans, Jorvik to the Vikings, Eoforwic to the Angles, Eboracum to the Romans. But the Celts named it first: Eburakon, which means ‘the place of the yews’. Those long-lived, melancholy trees are ancient markers of the sacred – so perhaps York’s name hints at an even older, undocumented history.

One thing is for sure: the roots of York are sunk deep into English soil – deeper, indeed, than the idea of England itself. But perhaps such considerations don’t matter to you. Perhaps you’re a thorough-going rationalist who’d pick an alternative capital on the basis of population size or economic productivity or some other bean-counting consideration. But if that’s your game, why move the capital at all? On just about any conventional measure, London beats our other cities by an insurmountable margin.

Other nominations in this series are based on familiarity not rationality – a town or city where the author was born or has come to love. That’s admirable, but a capital city has to stand not just for one person but for everyone; not just for one lifetime but many lifetimes.

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Why Government should go West

By Robin Aitken

In this regard, York has experience. It already is, or used to be, a capital city. Most obviously, it’s the capital of Yorkshire – England’s biggest county and God’s Own Country. In medieval and early modern times, it was the seat of the Council of the North. Earlier, it was the greatest city of the Danelaw and the capital of the Jorvik kingdom. Earlier still, it was one of the Roman capitals of Britain – ‘Britannia’ being divided into two (or, at times, more) provinces. To this day, the Church of England is divided into two ecclesiastical provinces – Canterbury and York. Hence the grandeur of York Minister and the existence of England’s other Anglican Archbishop.

It has to be said that this history also exemplifies the long subordination of the North to the South. The Archbishop of York is junior to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Council of the North represented the King in London. The independence of the Danelaw was eventually extinguished, and the North harried by William the Conqueror. The Roman province that Eboracum was the capital of was called Britannia Inferior (and, later Britannia Secunda). Even in the 20th century, it was Whitehall practice to refer to the country beyond the South as “outer Britain”.

There can no better reason for choosing a new capital than to re-empower the North. Here are three scenarios in which it could happen:

1. To stop the UK from being completely dominated by London (assuming London doesn’t force the issue by breaking-away, Singapore style).

2. To establish an English parliament and an English national government equivalent to the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales.

3. To establish a modern-day version of the Council of the North so that strategic decisions affecting the whole of the North of England can be made in and by the North of England.

In each scenario, York is the historically legitimate choice.

Suggested reading

Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

But the case for the city does not end in the past. Geographically, it is situated not only in the North, but at a strategic location linking the area’s two great urban clusters: the Trans-Pennine conurbation which runs from Liverpool to Leeds; and the Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside cities of the North East. Oh and don’t forget Hull and Humberside, directly to the East. The capacity for convection stretches further afield – down to the Midlands and East Anglia in one direction and up to Scotland in the other. York therefore has the potential to serve as a new and non-Londoncentric focal point for the United Kingdom.

York itself is not the biggest of cities. Though it has a history of manufacturing (most famously, chocolate), it was not one of the main centres of the industrial revolution. But that should be seen as an advantage. For a start, choosing York would mean not having to choose between England’s so-called core cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. The choice of York would avoid elevating one of these eight rivals over the others.

York also has room to grow. Not part of a wider conurbation, it’s a city with a proven record of success in overcoming deindustrialisation and building a prosperous modern economy. However, any expansion is artificially restricted by a greenbelt.

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Slaying dragons: the stifling British green belt

By Ian Birrell

Understandably, residents want to avoid ugly, unsustainable, traffic-choked development. As unfashionable as greenbelts are today, they are what stopped the cities of the North from merging into a poorly-planned megacity (or London from swallowing up the whole of the South East). However, large scale development doesn’t have to be unsustainable. It doesn’t have to be wasteful of land or dependent on the car. It can be respectful of a city’s heritage and inspired by the character and materials of the local built environment. Development, if it draws upon the wisdom of tradition and the wonders of modern technology, can make places better not worse.

In the past we’ve been able to turn small cities into great cities – and it would be a terrible indictment of our own times if we felt we could no longer do so.

One way or another this country needs to house its growing population. It also needs to rebalance its economy – unlocking the full potential of the North instead of putting all our eggs into one basket (London). I’m not suggesting that it’s northern cities like York that should should build all the new houses. As a southerner (so southern I’m half-French), I wouldn’t dare.

There’s nothing wrong with York as it is now – it’s a lovely place. I fully support the right of its people to shape their own future, to be and become whatever they want to be – not least having control over a fair share of the country’s infrastructure investment funds.

York was built to be a great city, a home to leaders, a capital.

It should have the opportunity to choose greatness again.

For Christians, it is a celebration of the moment God broke through into recorded time, became incarnate, fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament, atoned for our sins on the Cross, and, in the ultimate miracle, conquered sin and death through the resurrection.

Many who aren’t Christian still believe it to be “the greatest story ever told”. They might not be prepared to acknowledge the divinity of Christ, but the story of redemption and atonement nonetheless inspires awe.

This sense stems from the story’s deep connection to our moral identity and our sense of sin and guilt. Humans instinctively yearn for repentance and forgiveness – wanting absolution and a fresh start when we make mistakes.

Secular apologists for the power of the story point to Jung and what he had to say about the hold myths have over us: the endurance of a story is testament to its strength and ‘truth’. Arguably, the Christian understanding of the nature of human responsibility and redemption has never been surpassed in moral philosophy.

Further reading

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

Nelson Mandela understood this. When he sought to bring reconciliation to the peoples of South Africa after the apartheid era, he realised that it needed something special. His Truth and Reconciliation Committees brought the victims of racism and oppression face to face with their persecutors in such a way that the oppressors (some of them) repented and the victims (many of them) were able to forgive. Some of the moments of confession and forgiveness during these hearings were among the most moving you will ever hear.

In this way, Mandela managed to draw a line under apartheid, and sowed the seeds for a reconciled society. It was an extraordinary act of political imagination.

In secular Britain, we have almost abandoned the traditions – even the language – of repentance, forgiveness and redemption. Yet we are most certainly in need of reconciliation: reconciliation with our history as a nation, and reconciliation with each other over our different interpretations of that history.

A recurring theme in our national conversation over the past few years (quite heavily embedded in the Brexit debate) has been the shame in some quarters over certain episodes in our history.

Further reading

Fukuyama's blinkered view of history

By Douglas Murray

In some instances, this is justified. We cannot be anything other than ashamed of our role in the early expansion of the slave trade. The depredations and cruelty of the East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries have still not been fully laid bare. Our role in waging war on China in order to force them to open their market to the opium trade (which makes the opioid epidemic look like a picnic) is a national disgrace.

We recently commemorated the hundredth anniversary of the Amritsar Massacre, when Brigadier Reginald  Dwyer opened fire on up to 1,100 demonstrators with the specific aim of “striking terror” into the Punjab. The Iraq War is one of the most damaging cases of displacement activity in history.

Yet we were also the country which, thanks to William Wilberforce, was the first to bring an end to the slave trade. The British Empire exported democracy and the rule of law to peoples across the globe, and our withdrawal from Empire was one of the speediest, most dignified and peaceful of all imperial retreats. (The enduring loyalty and friendship of the British Commonwealth is testament to our legacy). Countries from all over the world honour and respect us for the role we played in defending freedom against the Nazis.

Our imperial history, though, is contested ground. According to a recent YouGov poll, 59% think the Empire is something to be proud of, 19% something to be ashamed of. That is a significant minority who only feel shame for our country’s past.

Further reading

Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

The shame narrative was embodied in the recent assault on the memory of Winston Churchill, in which he was described as a “white supremacist and mass murderer”. It is also a motivator for those people around Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, such as Seamus Milne. It is an undercurrent of Jon Snow’s “I have never seen so many white men in one place” Channel 4 News.

Is it not time to bring both sides of the debate together?  We can all repent of the episodes which are a source of shame but celebrate the achievements of which we can be proud.

Our national history should not be a source of such polarisation. A little truth telling from both sides would bring us to a more settled understanding which embraces both those things which we can celebrate along with the “crimes, follies and misfortunes” which stain the history of all countries and communities.

To progress, an individual must let go of those things holding them back. They must let these die, so that something new can be born. So too a nation.

We already have a National Remembrance day. But this is a day of mourning for those we lost. Perhaps we could introduce a new Day of Reconciliation. It could be called British History Day.

We could celebrate Magna Carta, Wilberforce, the liberation of Europe. But we can also commemorate the episodes of which we are ashamed – the slave trade, the East India Company, the Opium Wars. We could bring together all parts of the community to acknowledge the ‘sins’ of the past and make peace. Might it bring healing?

It started with film. I was watching Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, which portrays the last hours of the dictator’s life and the scrabble for power afterward in bleakly hilarious fashion, and then Bridge of Spies, the Tom Hanks espionage vehicle, and I realised: I know embarrassingly little about the Cold War.

It’s not that I didn’t know anything. I lived through about a decade of it, for a start. But I mainly knew the big events, and mainly either as little more than names, or as set-pieces somewhat devoid of context: the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift. I didn’t have a good grasp of the sweep of it, how all the pieces fitted together.

Suggested Reading

Does liberalism need global conflict in order to thrive?

By Peter Franklin

Someone recommended to me The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis, a much-respected historian of the period. It’s not a long book – fewer than 300 pages, not counting the references and index, which isn’t much when you’re cramming in the better part of a century of complex geopolitical history. But it covers that ground brilliantly. It doesn’t travel in strict chronological order, but breaks the narrative up into various themes that Gaddis considers relevant, such as “Command vs Spontaneity”, on the differences between the two ideologies that faced each other, or “Actors”, on the individual men and women (Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Walesa, John Paul II) who “widened the range” of historical possibilities and helped bring the conflict to an end. It’s a brilliant, quick overview of a vital part of history.

While it was fascinating, though, it only really went back to 1917, and, when in passing it described Lenin’s accession to power as a “coup d’etat” rather than a popular movement, it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the Russian Revolution either. So I looked on Amazon, which recommended Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. That was a very, very different book – 900 pages, and rather than skimming over decades in a few pages, it might, for example, spend a similar number of pages examining serfs’ farming techniques in a particular village a few miles outside Moscow in 1888. It was, it should be admitted, a fair old slog, and I kept getting bogged down and wandering off to re-read old Iain M Banks books. But I know an awful lot more about the Russian Revolution than I used to. If you’re in the market for a properly in-depth discussion, it’s worthwhile.

Suggested Reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

A similar journey happened to me with the English reformation. I started by reading Dissolution, book one of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series, about a 16th-century lawyer whom Thomas Cromwell asks to solve a murder. Then I read book two, and then books three to six. They’re gripping and evocative, if a little silly, and I was hooked. Having done that, on the recommendation of a friend I read An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears, set in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which similarly revolves around politics and murder, but is a much cleverer and more moving work.

But, once again, I realised: I don’t know enough about the English reformation. In fact, I don’t know enough about British history in general. I’ve spent a lot of my life reading about science, but very little about history. So I embarked on Simon Schama’s splendid A History of Britain (volume 1), which takes us from Stone Age settlements to the last days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First (spoiler: she dies at the end).

More Christmas Reading

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I said at the beginning that I found these books oddly heartening. And I did. Because although we think we’re divided as a society now, with Brexit and the culture war, at least we’re not as divided as Tudor England, when the Protestant/Catholic divide nearly drove us to civil war on several occasions (and arguably did, depending on whether you count the Pilgrimage of Grace and the other rebellions against the crown as “civil wars”). And we don’t have the tsarist Third Section secret police, or the Soviet Cheka, or William Cecil’s network of informers, listening to whispers from neighbours about whether we’ve ever spoken ill of the Tsar or Comrade Stalin or Queen Bess. And even though we think we live in a dangerous time, we no longer have two impossibly powerful states staring at each other through the radar screens of nuclear missiles, fingers on the buttons.

Maybe this is naive. I’m a naturally optimistic person; maybe someone else, of a more pessimistic – or as they would see it, realistic – disposition, would read the same books and think “this shows us how easy it is to go from this world of ease and peace to darkness and violence”. The question, perhaps, is whether we should assume that the (relatively) peaceful time we live in is now the norm, and we have left that darkness in our past, or whether it is a thin veneer that we have built over a pit of despair and that could be stripped away at any moment.

But for me, at least, it felt like a reminder. Things aren’t perfect now. But human progress is real, and we have made the world a lot better than it was 50, or 100, or 500 years ago.