In this edition:
• Showing our age
• Special delivery
• Unfriendly wagers
• A shore thing
• Sale therapy
“Britain’s fishermen became the folk heroes of Brexit. In Brixham, they were promised a brighter future. Did it ever arrive?”
A reading list on the weird and wonderful culture of Great Britain.
“One road unquestionably leads from Narnia to Brexit. Lewis would have hated the notion of a superstate with all the extra ‘meddling’ that implies.”
“A children’s story,” wrote Lewis, “is the best art form for something you have to say.”
The soft-focus Britain of Downton Abbey bears little resemblance to the real Britain collapsing under the weight of racism, austerity, and COVID-19. As Brexit plods on, it’s time for an honest reckoning of the history and future of this outsize little island.
“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”
Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”
The decline of national political authority requires a new transnational political system. First we have to stop denying the problem.
In an increasingly insular Britain, the world’s most cosmopolitan capital is bracing for an uncertain future.
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