ISLAND STORIES
BRITAIN AND ITS HISTORY IN THE AGE OF BREXIT
DAVID REYNOLDS
William Collins, 294pp, £16.99
‘The Brexit debate was certainly shaped by historical narratives,’ wrote history professor Michael J Braddick in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘In Island Stories, David Reynolds subjects these narratives to brisk, witty and often acerbic
appraisal. There are many treats along the way, for example his withering assessment of Theresa May’s negotiating priorities and political qualities, but his focus is four common narratives of the British past: of decline, of Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe, of British identity, and of the imperial past... This is not a book about the experience of ordinary Britons, but about how flawed views of Britain’s past have affected policy-making.’
But the book left AN Wilson cold. ‘Reynolds has done his best, but the book is a dog’s dinner,’ he wrote in his review for the Times. ‘He gives us a résumé of Britain and Europe seen through the eyes of a history teacher and ends up with a critique of Theresa May’s attempt to get through a compromise Brexit deal. What he writes is perfectly fair, but it has all been said a thousand times by the leader writers; no one needs a don from Cambridge to tell us that she made a hash of things.’
Even more dismissive of Reynolds’s claim that Brexit was a ‘national trauma’ was historian Dominic Sandbrook in the Sunday Times. ‘The experience of watching Emily Thornberry and Mark Francois arguing about Brexit is certainly very unpleasant. But perhaps only a Cambridge academic could find it genuinely traumatic.’ Despite the boast on the dust jacket, nothing
Reynolds says ‘is even vaguely unconventional’ and ‘his whole enterprise feels like a debate with somebody who simply does not exist’.
‘Reynolds has done his best, but the book is a dog’s dinner’