Anglo Nostalgia
By Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassù
Hurst Publications, 234pp, £25/$32.95
There has for some time been a popular theory that a majority of the British population want to leave the European Union because they have never got used to the UK becoming an ordinary country, and that in their hearts they are nostalgic for the British Empire.
The popularity of this theory has grown considerably in the EU ever since the publication last year of Heroic Failure: Brexit and The Politics of Pain by Fintan O’Toole, which depicts the enterprise as one devised by aloof public school toffs divorced from reality.
