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“... of the semi-rural south as well. Two readings of English nationalism compete. One comes from Tom Nairn, who named it ‘perpetually regressive’, with a ‘stalled and pathological character’. His books have argued that English political imagination has been ‘stunted’ by Britishness, and that only the break-up of the British state can ...”

“... contrarianism, a sprinkling of George Steiner for intransigent cultural pessimism, a garnish of Tom Nairn for caustic Scottish sarcasm – but the result might still fall well short of the original. The critic as preacher needs a more earnest and more settled moral sensibility to appeal to than is now available – or even desirable. Carlyle’s ...”

“... on the other hand, will find the image of the crass and brutal dominie vividly present, as with Tom Leonard’s ‘Mr Johnstone’: Jenkins, all too clearly it is time for some ritual physical humiliation; and if you cry, boy, you will prove what I suspect – you are not a man. But comparison with other educational systems is needed to prove Smout’s ...”

“... Scotland should have outgrown its own pantomime by now. ‘Ending the war in Ulster,’ Tom Nairn wrote in After Britain (2000), ‘entailed a fundamental rearticulation of the United Kingdom’s unitarist tradition, founded on a post-Thatcher recognition that – in the language of the “Downing Street Declaration” – Britain no longer ...”

“... of his cultural thinking. Thomas’s England pioneers the break-up of Britain that Smith, after Tom Nairn, desiderates. It is devolutionary, regional, local, ecological: a challenge to ‘the word Imperialism’. When he declined to aim This England, his wartime anthology, ‘at what a committee from Great Britain and Ireland might call complete’, he ...”

“... would be pretty much sealed. We would enter the scenario predicted – with some relish – by Tom Nairn, the sage of Scottish political prophecy: ‘Any day now the wolves will break into the drawing room – and it’ll not be the cucumber sandwiches they’re after!’ But that seems unlikely. Assuming the wolves are still some way off, might not a ...”

“... capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly a more egalitarian country than England’, its ‘gritty sense of equality derives from the old theocracy, not from Jacobinism or Bolshevism ...”

“... there had been an upsurge in commentary on the ‘North-South divide’ over the previous decade. Tom Hazeldine suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is ...”

“... literary tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at ...”

“... as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I contributed the piece on ‘The Radical Literary Tradition’) – a fling at the Establishment which Gordon Brown, as a student at ...”

“... Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of Tom Nairn and myself, but more wounding in effect. One of his charges was that Raymond had become half-absorbed, in manner and preoccupation, by the ruling-class academy. ‘Oh, the sunlit quadrangle, the clinking of glasses of port, the quiet converse of ...”

“... frighteners at a time when there is much to fear but more to be said for keeping one’s nerve (as Tom Nairn reminds us elsewhere in this issue). Kaplan is the author of Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, which made Clinton’s bedside reading list and was said to have shaped White House thinking, such as it was, about the former Yugoslavia. Three ...”

“... have been a cottage industry in Britain since the 1950s. The thesis advanced by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn in the 1960s and 1970s was that Britain modernised too early and not enough, never experiencing a proper ‘bourgeois revolution’ (along the lines of 1789) or developing a fully self-conscious or revolutionary proletariat. Britain’s empire ...”

“... North or Midlands. Underlying this peculiarity of the English scene is the pattern described by Tom Nairn, fresh from Pisa, writing fifty years ago of the assimilation by the local bourgeoisie of the conservatism of the landowning rulers of the country: The very urban world, the bricks and mortar in which most of the population lives, is the image of ...”

“... had been dreaming the wrong dream. The June 1968 issue of OZ ended with a review by the young Tom Nairn of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nairn did his best to like the film but couldn’t hack it. It led back, he decided, ‘into the heart of the oldest, stalest kind of despair with the human state. The ...”