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Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
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Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
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Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
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... dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of particular historical conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of ...

New Unions for Old

Colin Kidd, 4 March 2021

The Case for Scottish Independence: A History of Nationalist Thought in Modern Scotland 
by Ben Jackson.
Cambridge, 210 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 1 108 79318 6
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Standing up for Scotland: Nationalist Unionism and Scottish Party Politics, 1884-2014 
by David Torrance.
Edinburgh, 258 pp., £80, May 2020, 978 1 4744 4781 2
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... figure in Jackson’s book were buzzing about the Sillars camp. Two of them – Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn – are very familiar to readers of this paper. Another, the economist George Kerevan, a former member of the International Marxist Group and then a Labour councillor, went on to become an influential nationalist commentator with fervently ...

Post-Nationalism

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 3 December 1992

English Questions 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 370 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 375 9
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A Zone of Engagement 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 384 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 377 5
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... and Left Review, the contributors to New Left Review were provoked by the condition of what Tom Nairn called Ukania. But they distanced themselves from the old Ukanian Left. The country’s economy, they said, was in chronic decline, its politics were a comprehensive disaster, its society was stalled in defensive resentment, and there was no ...

Faculty at War

Tom Paulin, 17 June 1982

Re-Reading English 
edited by Peter Widdowson.
Methuen, 246 pp., £7.95, March 1982, 0 416 31150 4
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Against Criticism 
by Iain McGilchrist.
Faber, 271 pp., £12.50, May 1982, 0 571 11922 0
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... confidently referred to as ‘Great Britain’ but whose imminent fragmentation is prophesied by Tom Nairn and others. Unfortunately, Dr Widdowson and most of his contributors appear to share a deep hatred of art and to be united in a desire to abolish both texts and authors. They are frustrated sociologists who believe that sonnets and beer mats ought ...

Short Cuts

Rory Scothorne: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation, 4 January 2024

... and locals who complain about the city’s ‘festivalisation’ are easy to caricature. In 1967, Tom Nairn wrote that ‘Edinburgh’s soul is Bible-black, pickled in boredom by centuries of sermons, swaddled in the shabby gentility of the Kirk – what difference could 21 years of Festival make to this?’ The city’s churches now see more ...
... little scope. But they signified that the various episodes of national development that Tom Nairn had seen Scotland dodging in the 19th century were suddenly swallowed in concentrated form. Just how distinctive the resulting discourse is became plain to me on reading Noel Annan’s Our Age. Here was a stylish narrative – of the English ...

Empires in Disguise

Tom Stevenson, 4 May 2023

Superstates: Empires of the 21st Century 
by Alasdair Roberts.
Polity, 235 pp., £17.99, December 2022, 978 1 5095 4448 6
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... EU leaders, who have become ‘more sophisticated in navigating the shoals of treaty reform’. Tom Nairn argued that the EU suffers from a condition that also characterised the pre-First World War multinational empires: uneven development generates subtle forms of nationalist resistance which frustrate supranational designs. The EU has a fearsome ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... I began to meet the NLR circle and make friends among them. I liked and respected no one more than Tom Nairn, the Scottish nationalist-Marxist who in 1977 published his polemic The Break-up of Britain, which caused a real uproar and led to a stinging attack from Eric Hobsbawm, then the leading figure among the older generation of Marxist historians. The ...

Nairn is best

Neal Ascherson, 21 May 1987

NairnIn Darkness and Light 
by David Thomson.
Hutchinson, 303 pp., £12.95, April 1987, 0 09 168360 2
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... physical exertion was banned. His mother sent him away from London to live with her family at Nairn, in north-eastern Scotland, on the shore of the Moray Firth. The years that he passed there built the emotional and imaginative foundations of his life. Some people contend that this is the most ‘Scottish’ part of Scotland, even in our own times. It’s ...

Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square

Christopher Hitchens: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 4 June 1998

1968: Marching in the Streets 
by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins.
Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £20, May 1998, 0 7475 3763 1
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The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 
by Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn.
Verso, 175 pp., £10, May 1998, 1 85984 290 9
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The Love Germ 
by Jill Neville.
Verso, 149 pp., £9, May 1998, 1 85984 285 2
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... who needed the illusion of an unsleeping and keenly ideological foe.)Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn’s book The Beginning of the End, which I read when it first came out, is more interesting now than it was then. It’s rather sporting of the current Nairn to allow it to be reprinted. At the time, it seemed to ...

A Long Silence

David A. Bell: ‘Englishness’, 14 December 2000

Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 
by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 389 pp., £25, April 2000, 9780198206811
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... opposed to Britain and Britishness, is timely. Earlier this summer, a leader in the Times attacked Tom Nairn, Eric Hobsbawm and especially Linda Colley for supplying a tendentious, politicised justification for the break-up of Britain. Citing a recent article by J.C.D. Clark, the Times claimed that Britain and Britishness, far from being ...

Diary

John Lloyd: Split Scots, 25 June 1992

... of two intellectuals who have put forward a case somewhat short of the Nationalist one: these are Tom Nairn and Neal Ascherson, both of whom are active in the organisation Common Cause – which, like Scotland United, is seeking to bring together with the Nationalists a largely leftist political movement. Their case is well-known: it depends on a series ...

Down Dalston Lane

Neal Ascherson, 27 June 1991

A Journey through Ruins: The Last Days of London 
by Patrick Wright.
Radius, 294 pp., £16.99, May 1991, 0 09 173190 9
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... of the young cultural critics. He drew ideas from sources as diverse as Agnes Heller and Tom Nairn; in turn, his thought was rapidly and efficiently mined in the campaign against the ‘heritage industry’ which took shape in the later Eighties (I speak as one of the grateful miners). Now, though, an unexpected corner has been turned. The last ...

Making things happen

Ross McKibbin, 26 July 1990

Heroes and Villains: Selected Essays 
by R.W. Johnson.
Harvester, 347 pp., £25, July 1990, 9780745007359
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... The effect is to diminish arguments which are otherwise blameless: see also the essay ‘Tom Nairn and the Monarchy’. A more impressive example of Johnson’s truth-telling is his review of Hugo Young’s One of Us, ‘Thatcher’s New Order’, and there are several reasons for this. First, it is obviously a book he admires; second, he is ...

Highway to Modernity

Colin Kidd: The British Enlightenment, 8 March 2001

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World 
by Roy Porter.
Allen Lane, 728 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7139 9152 6
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... to embrace the Scottish Enlightenment is one of the major ironies of Scottish intellectual life. Tom Nairn observed long ago that ‘if Scottish nationalists have ever been really united on one thing it is their constant execration and denunciation of Enlightenment culture.’ Indeed, William Ferguson, the leading proponent of a nationalist ...

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