Anna Keay and Hannah Rose Woods - Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be

In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution. Charles I, was executed for treason. Within weeks the English monarchy had been abolished and the ‘useless and dangerous’ House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, were now the sovereign force in the land. What this meant, and where it would lead, no one knew.

Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic: Britain Without A Crown (winner of the 2022 Duff Cooper Prize) is the story of the extraordinary decade that followed. It takes as its guides the people who lived through those years. Among them is Anna Trapnel, the daughter of a Deptford shipwright whose visions transfixed the nation. John Bradshaw, the Cheshire lawyer who found himself trying the King. Marchamont Nedham, the irrepressible newspaper man and puppet master of propaganda. Gerrard Winstanley, who strove for a Utopia of common ownership where no one went hungry. William Petty, the precocious scientist whose mapping of Ireland prefaced the dispossession of tens of thousands. And the indomitable Countess of Derby who defended to the last the final Royalist stronghold on the Isle of Man. Anna Keay brings to vivid life the most extraordinary and experimental decade in Britain’s history. It is the story of how these tempestuous years set the British Isles on a new course, and of what happened when a conservative people tried revolution.

In Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History Of Britain, Hannah Rose Wood explores how nostalgia has shaped Britain. Modern politicians implore us to draw on the 'Blitz Spirit' of wartime Britain, post-war Britons mourned the lost innocence of Edwardian life, anxious Edwardians longed to return to a golden era of Victorian optimism, while Victorian artists dreamt of retreating to a medieval, pre-industrial age. Longing to go back to the 'good old days' is nothing new, but it's also not what it used to be.

Rule, Nostalgia is an eye-opening history of Britain's perennial fixation with its own past that explores why nostalgia has been such an enduring and seductive emotion across hundreds of years of change. Cultural historian Hannah Rose Woods paints a novel picture of Britain, both strange and familiar, separating the fact from the fantasy, debunking pervasive myths and illuminating the remarkable influence that nostalgia's perpetual backwards glance has had on our history, politics and society over the last five hundred years.

This is a timely and enlightening interrogation of national character, emotion, identity and myth making that explores how this nostalgic isle's history was written, re-written and (rightly or wrongly) remembered.

The Restless Republic: Britain Without A Crown was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2022 and was recognised as The Sunday Times History Book of the Year 2022.