Tom Nairn

Aug 14, 2024 | versobooks.com | Tom Nairn |Raphael Samuel |Raymond Williams

As the sun rose on the Summer Solstice of 1792, the Druid-Bards gathered in North London, at the summit of Primrose Hill. Led by Edward Williams, a Welsh stonemason and poet better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, they enacted a series of supposedly ancient Celtic rituals — actually recent inventions, products of Iolo’s febrile historical imagination, helped along by his self-medication with hallucinatory quantities of laudanum.

Jan 11, 2024 | versobooks.com | Tom Nairn

The politics of dispossession is nationalism – an over-generalisation which at once calls for precise qualification.It is quite true that all nationalists are not dispossessed: possessors have their own (often strident) variations on the theme. It is also true that nationality politics did not originate among the crushed and uprooted: indeed its primary source was the nouveaux riches or upwardly mobile of early-modem times, in Holland, England and France.

Sep 25, 2023 | versobooks.com | Tom Nairn |Chris Bambery

This autumn with Conter radio I am setting out this story in a series of podcasts based on the book. Each episode takes on a particular moment in history, explores what happened, the major figures involved. The podcast seeks to bring this history to life because in order to know where we are going, we must know where we come from.

Jun 2, 2023 | redpepper.org.uk | Tom Nairn

The English questionTom Nairn’s The Breakup of Britain, recently republished at the height of the Brexit debate, made it clear to me that the deep, underlying issues within British politics and the question of the monarchy are still not being addressed. In particular, Nairn helped me fully to consider the possible future for English politics if England were left clinging to the relics of the British empire in splendid isolation.

Apr 28, 2023 | newleftreview.org | Tom Nairn

For centuries, bourgeois civilization in England turned the same face to the world, the calm and unchanging countenance of the oldest and most stable of bourgeois societies, capable of holding disasters and crises at bay by virtue of some extraordinary secret in its possession, thanks to which the English bourgeoisie seemed to have found a way of taming the forces of history, reducing them to harmless and sensible processes of evolution.