What everyone knows about Britain*

How do you see Britain? It's tempting to think of the UK as a fundamentally stable and successful nation. But events of the past few years, from Brexit to exposés of imperial history, have begun to spark fierce public debates about whether that is true. Is Britain, just a marginal northern European island nation, marked by injustices, corruption and with a bloody history of slavery, repression and looting? And yet UK politics, media, and public opinion live constantly in the shadow of old myths, Second World War era nostalgia, and a belief in supposedly core British values of tolerance, decency and fair play. In this book, Michael Peel digs into the national consciousness with the perspective of distance to pull apart the ways in which we British have become unmoored from crucial truths about ourselves.