Empires of the Imagination | Holger Hoock

In short, plaudits to Holger — he’s played a blinder. It is not his fault that, whilst being thoroughly delightful, this book also managed to work me up into a fearful bate.

Almost every aspect of the society Hoock describes here brims with confidence. This was a political society bursting with pride, celebrating itself and its history, and glorying in the wondrous potential of human endeavour met with divine inspiration. This was a time when men still aimed for what the young Henry VIII had set his sights on at the dawn of the 16th century: ‘virtue, glory and immortality.’ They bled for their country and died in foreign fields and were celebrated. They raised great cathedrals towards the heavens. And they wanted to tell themselves, and by extension to tell us, all about it.

I’m not an idiot. I know there was also plenty of slavery, drudgery, toil, racism, misery and oppression, which po-faced 21st-century prime ministers still periodically and preposterously apologise for. Many of the great artistic and cultural achievements of the age were propaganda for the privileged few as opposed to the downtrodden many.

And yet . . . Where is this national pride in British politics and culture today? Our politicians are now by instinct craven and apologetic, unwilling to be patriotic for fear of seeming un-PC. The apotheosis of our age is not a proposal to stick Nelson on a pyramid in St Paul’s. It is letting the great unwashed strut their stuff on Barry’s vacant fourth plinth, putting dimwits on a pedestal, literally. And as for the architecture … I have to stop ranting. I sound like bloody Prince Charles.