A strong case could be made that children’s literature, which by virtue of its audience often sheds the self-consciousness affecting many British writers, fits the bill perfectly: for what is childhood other than a lost and half-remembered homeland? An inward-looking British nationalism would owe more to the world of Brambly Hedge than the Lusiads or Kalevela: yet even Tolkien’s modern-day national epic, a conscious imitation of European nationalist myths, was explicitly written for children. Even the Edwardian high-summer whimsy of The Wind in the Willows is suddenly interrupted, in the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” sequence, by a mystical, neo-pagan reverence for the spirits of the land. Tapping into the deeper wellsprings of cultural consciousness, children’s writing perhaps reveals hidden potentialities for such a project.

If we accept this thesis, then a suitable candidate, I would suggest, for such nationalist myth-making would be the postwar writer Rosemary Sutcliff’s series of novels, most of them ostensibly written for children, on Roman Britain and its violent collapse. For as Sutcliff remarked to an American audience, gathered to celebrate her work, “Children should be allowed the great themes, which are also often tragic themes, which they can receive and make use of better than most adults can.” Last year’s 70th anniversary of her most famous novel, that staple of the pre-Blair primary school library The Eagle of the Ninth, saw a modest flurry of appreciative retrospectives. Yet The Eagle, though her breakout book, is not representative of her mature body of work (which, by the way, offers passages of fine writing, particularly terse and beautiful nature-writing, far beyond that currently marketed towards adults). The Eagle is, essentially, a Kipling novel, directly influenced by her literary Sussex neighbor in space, if not time: indeed Puck of Pook’s Hill was Sutcliff’s childhood favorite.

The Eagle’s lead character, a young Roman officer, disguises himself as a native in a Boy’s Own adventure of self-discovery, leading him across the rainy Northwest Frontier to live among Pictland’s untamed frontier tribes, in their smoky mountain huts bedecked in the savage brilliance of “colorful native rugs”. The native tribes, driven to fury by “their holy men” to wage war against “the unbelievers” are, with great difficulty, outwitted by the decent, sensible young Roman subaltern, who then retires, like a good servant of the Raj, to live the quiet life of a Sussex country gentleman on his army pension. An obvious post-imperial novel, though perhaps not fully consciously, The Eagle is most interesting in establishing the mythic framework, and much of the anthropological quality, of her later, more morally and politically complex novels set within the context of the great Saxon migration — we might call it the Vortigernwave — that would carve an England from the land of the unwilling Britons.

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Ultimately, though, Sutcliff’s reputation ought to rest on her great adult Arthurian novel, Sword at Sunset, written in a period of what she described as trancelike “possession”. With the medieval Matter of Britain as her subject, Sutcliff imagines a world where a society that once seemed enduring crumbles into disrepair. Yet the love of Britain, and its strange and ancient insular civilization, drives its hero to a fierce, if doomed, rearguard defense, “that the things worth saving shall not go down into the dark”. Half-Roman and half-Briton — his battle cry is Yr Wydffa, the Welsh name for Snowdon whose official re-adoption is now resented by some Anglophones — her Artorius is torn between two worlds, that of Roman rationality and straight lines, and of native Celtic mysticism and curved and sinuous pattern-making.

This is a theme running throughout her books, in which the decent, sensible if officious Roman is an obvious stand-in for the modern Englishman, in a world where the Englishman’s actual ancestors are the wild invading barbarians. As she notes in the introduction to her children’s retelling of the Irish Ulster Cycle, “The Cuchulain Saga belongs to the Celts, the people of Ireland and Wales and the Highlands of Scotland, just as the story of Beowulf belongs to the Anglo-Saxons; that is very broadly speaking, to the English, and the Scottish Lowlanders. And neither Celt nor Saxon could have bred the other one’s story, for they belong to two quite different ways of thinking.” Fully adopting Matthew Arnold’s 19th-century distinction between the stolid, dependable Saxon, and the creative but erratic Celt, Sutcliff continues:

“However wild the happenings in the Saxon story, its feet remain firmly on the ground; and Beowulf and his companions are recognizably human beings grown to hero-size. But the Celtic tale leaps off into a world completely of the imagination, and the Red Branch Heroes have the blood of the Gods and the Fairy Kind (almost the same thing in Irish legend) running fiery in their veins. It is worth noticing this difference when reading either story, and remembering that in the main the people of Cuchulain and the people of Beowulf separately or mixed together are the stock that we in Britain are sprung from.”

A children’s writer today would not comfortably write the same thing, in the same way, yet a glance at Puffin novels of the Sixties and Seventies shows a world where the mythology of the British Isles, so bafflingly neglected today, was a common theme in postwar children’s writing. In other circumstances, we would term this, too, a kind of cultural nationalism: the creation of a shared corpus of myth spanning the British Isles, in which the Atlantic Archipelago, though at war with itself, is nevertheless a shared cultural unit.

For however distinct the Britons, or Picts, or Irish are in her novels, the Saxons or Romans are more different still: all the Celtic characters in her novels share a common religious and cultural worldview, and speak an apparently mutually intelligible language. Indeed, across her novels, Sutcliff creates her own pan-Isles vocabulary, gathered together from across dialects and eras with a brisk disregard for accuracy: a world of burns and bairns and kalegarths, where her British Celts say Sláinte as they down their anachronistic “fiery barley spirit”. Hibernicisms, of words and syntax, abound in her writing, whether justified by context or not: Sutcliff observed in her autobiography that her mother, of pure West Country extraction, would adopt a baffling Hiberno-English accent at moments of high emotion, “becoming Irish of the Irish. My father just used to wait patiently for the black mood to depart.”

From her Wessex mother, too, from a family devoted to the Raj and imperial service, Sutcliff claimed to derive a “residual trace of the second sight”. A believer in reincarnation, the increasingly physically disabled author, who chose to spend her life in the deep English countryside, overlaid her love for the land itself, for its “pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling”, with an awe-filled sense of its ancient, only partly buried power. Sutcliff’s Britain is an ancient, magical land, from which, at certain times and in certain remote places, great reserves of power can be summoned and drawn from. Magic may or may not be real — her rational, Romanized characters are ambivalent on the question — but, at times, it feels real enough to serve a political purpose.

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In just such a way, in Sword at Sunset, her Artorius, acclaimed as emperor within a circle of standing stones, “felt the great carved stone at the back of my heel, and something in me, in the touch of my heel against the stone, in my very loins that linked me with the earth and the gods and the stones of the Earth…” Britain is, to Sutcliff as many others, an ancient insular civilization unto itself: few other writers capture so succinctly both the natural beauty and the sheer strangeness of Britain, the enchanted weirdness of it, waiting to be drawn upon in time of need.

Though bred in the threatened softness of southern England, Sutcliff’s Late Roman heroes retreat to the upland peripheries of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Borders, and the bleak moorlands of today’s northern England in search of personal and national renewal. Behind them they leave the great cities of Rome’s once-glorious British civilization, falling into ruin and squalor as the invading Saxons settle them, now “half derelict, the frescoed plaster falling from the walls, the fine Purbeck marble cracked and damp-stained, the gilding blackened”. It is the world, returned to again and again in her novels, of the Saxon poem, “The Ruin”, though told from the perspective of the Romano-British refugee fleeing to the safety of the western hills, and not the squatting interloper. Abandoning the cities, now falling into danger and disrepair, her characters lament the transience of the world that bred them, even as they seek to make their final stand in Deep Britain.

This is precisely the process described by the scholar of cultural nationalism John Hutchinson when he observed that one product of nationalist revivalism, when viewed as a comparative type, “was the unexpected ‘discovery’ of remote areas of natural beauty, or of great cultural significance, that because of their ‘wildness’ and ‘hidden’ quality became mysterious reservoirs of the national spirit.” These wild and untouched peripheries, whether Finland’s lakes and forests or the bleak expanses of Connemara, “became ramparts of the nation to which groups, especially alienated urban educated middle classes, could turn to escape assimilation into foreign values and experience moral regeneration, thereby embedding themselves in the land. The defense of these regions from foreign cultural or political threat galvanized powerful nationalist movements.”

Sutcliff’s heroes, objectively British nationalists, represent one iteration of this ideological current. In today’s nascent British nationalist movement, if the oft-discussed “MythoYookay” X account represents Britain’s current, fallen state, then its counterbalancing ideological colleague is the MythoBritannia account, which centers on Britain’s dramatic landscapes, with an emphasis on the mystical and otherworldly — Glastonbury Tor, holy wells, the last surviving rainforests. The gentle downs and fields of southern England are less often invoked than the bleak and dramatic peaks and valleys of Britain’s highland peripheries: these are wild, untouched landscapes, which through their careful curation speak to a Britain older and more magical than England alone. Consciously in MythoBritannia’s case, and perhaps unconsciously in Sutcliff’s, this retreat to the peripheries represents a reservoir of cultural Britishness, directly analogous to the classical nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th century, from which modern-day political strength can be drawn. Both invoke the spirits of a nation not dead but merely sleeping, ready to be summoned, like Arthur and his knights, in the trials ahead.

Sutcliff’s characters are victims of a once-proud imperial state that can no longer protect them, or their ancient way of life, in their own homeland. All is transience, and irreparable change, the unwanted result of political failure, experienced as a catastrophic loss. “When you thought about it, you realized that you were living in a world that might fall to pieces at any moment,” observes a character in The Lantern Bearers. “Rome is hollow rotten at the heart,” says the British warlord Carausius in The Silver Branch, “and one day she will come crashing down. A hundred years ago, it must have seemed that all this was for ever; a hundred years hence — only the gods know… If I can make this one province strong — strong enough to stand alone when Rome goes down, then something may be saved from the darkness.”

What did Sutcliff, with her claimed second sight, feverishly writing while “possessed” by something greater than herself, mean by returning again and again to this threatened, collapsing civilization, while writing in the very different circumstances of immediate postwar Britain? As she would herself say of Sword at Sunset’s Artorius to a later interviewer, “for me in a way he stands for Britain” at a time when “we’re awfully uncertain of our future. Therefore we feel a kind of kinship for the Dark Ages; and I think for this reason we feel in a way the need for something to back us up, in the same way as Arthur ‘lights up’ the Dark Ages. We have the need for an archetype of some sort to pull us together, to get us through this, to spread light into the darkness until we can get through to a better world.” Sutcliff’s late Roman world, in our increasingly contested transition from one kind of nation to quite another, is perhaps better suited to a 21st century adult audience than a postwar children’s one. Morally complex, startlingly violent, both elegiac and cynical, Sutcliff’s own writing represents a lost land in itself.

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”.