RULE, NOSTALGIA
A BACKWARD HISTORY OF BRITAIN
HANNAH ROSE WOODS
WH Allen, 400pp, £20
‘ Rule, Nostalgia announces Woods as one of the most interesting new historians of her generation, whose best days lie (thankfully) before her,’ wrote Dan Jones in his Sunday Times review. ‘Smartly she writes her story in reverse, revealing a longing for the good old days – mostly misapprehended – as an imaginative seam running all the way from the culture wars of the 2020s to the Reformation in the 1530s... While she often seems exasperated by nostalgia as a brake on reason and progress, she has a sympathetic ear for her sources.’
Less effusive was Richard Vinen, in the Literary Review, who thought Woods can be ‘subtle’ despite having ‘a taste for sweeping generalisation’, and that her book contains ‘some padding, repetition and stating the bleeding obvious’.
Historian and former politician Tristram Hunt reviewed the book for the Financial Times, finding that ‘among the book’s most accomplished sections’ are those dissecting the late Victorian fears of urban degeneration and a widespread ‘anxiety about anxiety’, which a nascent advertising industry ruthlessly played on. ‘“Is the Fall of England’s Greatness Near At Hand?” asked the makers of Eno’s Fruit Salt, linking a sluggish gut to the end of Empire.’ Although there is ‘precious little comparative analysis’ – what about Trump’s Make America Great Again? – ‘the framing is consistently interesting and, with it, a clear-sighted warning about the dangers posed to democracy from a culture of perpetual nostalgia.’