Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit
PHILIP STEPHENS
(FABER &?faber, 480 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe
ROBERT TOMBS
(ALLEN LANE, 224 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • tel 020 7799 4064

“Man is a short-sighted creature,” Robinson Crusoe tells himself on his desert island, “[he] sees but a very little way before him.” Nor very far back, argues Philip Stephens in Britain Alone, a plangently persuasive history of post-war Blighty’s desperate search for its place in the world. The story of our past 75 years, he says, is a Moebius strip of unlearned lessons and fantasy futures. No prizes for guessing this is a book about Brexit.

To be sure, Stephens finds room for accounts of the Suez Crisis, Vietnam, the Iraq wars, not forgetting our post-imperial nuclear hang-ups. But at heart he wants to explain how sufficient numbers of the English (and it was only the English) came to believe they would be better off after cutting ties with the biggest trading bloc in the world. The answer, he says, is that the English are masters of self-deception. They really do believe that they, and they alone, won the war. Ever since, they’ve thrashed about from Atlanticist fantasy to isolationist frenzy in search of a boundless, bounteous past that never was.