THIS SOVEREIGN ISLE

BRITAIN IN AND OUT OF EUROPE

ROBERT TOMBS

Allen Lane, 203pp, £16.99

For Guardian reviewer Fintan O’toole, this is ‘much less a work of analysis than it is an expression of faith. It recites, albeit in mellow tones, the familiar Apostle’s Creed of Brexit: the referendum was won by the votes of “the excluded, the unemployed and simply the less well off” (no mention of the very wealthy southerners who voted for it); the EU is doomed; the Irish border question was probably got up by the French; there is no economic downside; the “Anglosphere” and the Commonwealth will replace the European connection. Even recited so suavely, these doctrines are no more convincing to the unbeliever. Given Tombs’s genuine intellectual

standing, this is probably as good as it gets.’

Roger Boyes, in the Times, recognised that Tombs is a ‘historian of France with a keen sense of how the Anglo-french rivalry coloured our view of Europe. Five of the eight bloodiest wars in world history, he says, were fought against the French... Yet ultimately Britain remained a strong peripheral power, a medium-size state that wanted to prosper through free trade.’ He sees Brexit as ‘an escape from confinement, a rational response rather than a populist reflex’, and his ‘journey from a Yes vote in 1975 to a No vote in 2016 is instructive, and not just because it is told with panache. It’s the way he punctures some of the longstanding Remainer narratives.’ Tombs has ‘made a strong and rational case for the Leave vote and may actually persuade some readers that Brexit was not an act of conspiratorial folly’.