James Hawes

Will the next generation wonder what the fuss over Brexit was about?

Robert Tombs thinks so, and aims to show how we can come together to build a new settlement and heal our fractured nation

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issue 23 January 2021

Robert Tombs’s new book is not long: 165 pages of argument, unadorned by maps or images. But brevity is good, and we pick it up expecting much insight, because its predecessor was so wonderful. In The English and Their History (2015), Tombs, a scholar of French, not English, history, boldly saw the wood where specialists saw only the trees.

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