the times | Saturday May 28 2022 saturday review 17
of Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard
II — “This royal throne of kings, this
sceptred isle... This other Eden, demi-
paradise” — is a piece of Tudor propagan-
da, an elegy for an England destroyed by
the Plantagenet Richard II’s misrule
and thus, by implication, restored to glory
by the playwright’s patron Elizabeth I and
her forebears.
John Major used nostalgia less success-
fully in 1993 when he invoked George Or-
well to reassure Britons that although their
future lay in Europe, the country would al-
ways be one of “long shadows on county
cricket grounds” and “old maids bicycling
to Holy Communion through the morning
mist”. Fascists and populists use it more
dangerously, to invoke a purer, more
powerful past that they promise to revive.
Mostly, though, it has been used against
various manifestations of progress in ways
that sound very familiar. Since nostalgia
tends to be pastoral, development is often
the target. In the interwar house-building
boom, the broadcaster Howard Marshall
lamented “a gimcrack civilisation” that
“crawls like a giant slug across the country,
leaving a foul trail of slime behind it”.
Loss of community is a regular refrain.
When slums were cleared, former inhabit-
ants often spoke in glowing terms of the
strength of relationships in those poor,ended up in Bedlam for shouting about
this conspiracy from the public gallery of
the House of Commons.
In that same revolutionary period,
France’s horological golden age, we are in-
troduced to a clockmaker who believed he
had lost his head. He was the possessor of
an impostor head — a physician at the
Bicêtre asylum recorded how he would
cry: “Look at these teeth. Mine were ex-
ceedingly handsome, but these are rotten.
My mouth was healthy; this one is dis-
eased. What a difference between this hair
and mine before my head was changed.”
He was apparently inspired or traumatised
by Louis XVI’s messy encounter with a
guillotine a few streets from his workshop.
This was, we learn, bad for business.
It is all quite engrossing, but I am not
sure the book lives up to its claim to be a
history of delusion. That isn’t really Shep-
herd’s fault: the subject intrigues us
because it is so hard to pin down. The clos-
est we get to a unifying argument is that
delusions “are protection from an unbear-
able reality”. That seems a sensible if
rather obvious note on which to close such
a varied and thought-provoking journey.
It is paired with a warning about our
“particular moment in history” when
“paranoid delusions in the form of con-
spiracy theories have taken an even firmer
hold on sections of the global populations”,
which strikes me as an unearned and
rather pro forma appeal to the zeitgeist.
Isn’t mass delusion a constant in history?
The moment of revelation never arrives
here. Delusion remains essentially impen-
etrable to the undeluded. Perhaps that is
why Burton is still so widely praised — he
saw his subject from the inside.
Beware the blue remembered hills —
nostalgia can be dark and dangerous
‘I
suppose in about 30 years’ time
people will insist on describing this
as the good old days,” runs the cap-
tion to a cartoon in Punch magazine
from 1944. It depicts two women
chatting as they watch others queueing
with their ration cards. And so, presuma-
bly, will future Britons see us as basking in
the sunlight and innocence that prevailed
before some new, hideous manifestation
of progress spoilt everything. Nostalgia, as
the historian (and archly eyebrowed Uni-
versity Challenge victor of 2016) Hannah
Rose Woods argues, is always with us.
Rule, Nostalgia is a timely book because
there’s a lot of it about. The notion that the
past was a better place has fuelled the rise
of populism. Donald Trump wanted to
make America great again. Vladimir Putin
has invaded Ukraine to rebuild the Great-
er Russia that was lost after the collapse of
the Soviet Union. The crazies who believe
in the far-right “great replacement” con-
spiracy theory kill people to return to
a time before Bill Gates or the Illuminati
or whoever sent immigrants to pollute
their land.
Britons have been knee-deep in the stuff
in recent years. As families trapped in their
homes during the pandemic took to play-
ing board games and keeping chickens, the
government used wartime references to
keep up national morale. The Queen’s
address to the nation echoed Vera Lynn’s
promise that “we’ll meet again”; Captain
Tom Moore, a veteran of the Second
World War, became the nation’s mascot.
Brexit was powered by nostalgia. Jacob
Rees-Mogg told the Conservative party
conference in 2017 that it was “Magna
Carta! It’s Waterloo! It’s Agincourt! It’s
Crécy! We win all of these things!” For
Boris Johnson, Brexit’s purpose was to
“rediscover some of the dynamism of the
bearded Victorians”.
Yet nostalgia is nonsense, because the
past for which the present yearns itself
harked back to a better time. “Trace [nos-
talgia] back to its source,” Woods writes,
“and you simply find more nostalgia.” So
the modern era idealises the crime-free
1950s, when people longed for the Eden
that prevailed before the war, when people
yearned for the lost innocence of the
Edwardian era, which compared its deca-
dence unfavourably to the energetic in-
dustry of the Victorians, who dreamt of a
pre-industrial time of quiet beauty and
careful craftsmen. And so on back to the
Tudors, who justified the Reformation as a
restoration of the independence Britain
enjoyed before its conquest by Rome.
Yet nostalgia, as we learn from this 500-
year journey backwards, is part of the
human condition because the era in which
one grew up is forever bathed in the golden
glow of childhood memory. However, the
ways in which it is used are about the
present, not the past. Nostalgia is often
deployed in support of nationalism. Johnglorious past Sarah Connolly at the 2009 Last Night of the PromsSISI BURN/ARENAPALThe misplaced notion
that the past was a
better place fuelled
Brexit and populism,
says Emma Duncan
It is not only her grasp of economics that
falters; other errors creep in. The Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet didn’t face trial
for “war crimes” and it is not quite clear
why this left-wing hate figure features at
all in a book about the modern super-rich.
She is on stronger ground lambasting the
sheer waste of ostentatious luxury: meals
cooked but never eaten; fully staffed houses
and luxury yachts awaiting the infrequent
visits of their owners; rare and precious ob-
jects treated as playthings. Nothing is ever
enough: when material delights pall, only
ever-rarer experiences, such as solitude
under starry skies, tickle the senses.
One of her pen portraits features Trav-
eller, who puts on impossibly luxurious
and exotic holidays (one such trip features
“the only mobile camp in Ethiopia that has
an en-suite bathroom with a flushing toi-
let”.) The search for unspoilt and novel ex-
periences destroys its quarry. And the
carbon footprint and environmental de-
struction, which fall hardest on the hum-
blest, are indefensible. “Luxury and sus-
tainability cannot inhabit the same planet:
one destroys the other,” she writes.
That contention deserves a closer look.
Some rich people have spent their money
making the planet a better place (not least
by rewilding their estates). They include
people such as George Soros, Bill Gates and
the Rausing family. Their philanthropy and
campaigning are not just idle hobbies.
The book’s most powerful message is
that the lives it describes are far less envia-
ble than they seem. The super-rich are
plagued by anxieties. Someone else may
have more money or nicer things. She
depicts them frantically checking their
inventories in case their staff are light-
fingered, living under constant surveil-
lance from staff and bodyguards, short of
real friends and, above all, bored. The big
secret about the super-rich is less the inde-
fensibility of their greed and arrogance,
and more the misery it brings them.
dirty, demolished streets — even though
the great majority of people who moved to
new towns had no regrets.
Consumerism is another target. In the
18th century, when luxury goods were first
imported on a large scale, fear of their
impact on the national backbone was rife.
Men who drank tea out of effeminate little
cups were a particular cause for concern.
“Were they the sons of tea-sippers,” the
writer Jonas Hanway raged in 1757, “who
won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt?”
(As the man who struggled to popularise
the umbrella, he may have been sensitive
about his masculinity.)
Perhaps because those who are enjoying
the tea or the new houses are less vocal
than those worrying about their effects,
perhaps because humanity is loss-averse
so people fear change — either way, nos-talgia rarely meets much opposition. Its
critics are heard only after particularly
grim episodes. In the wake of the First
World War, for instance, intellectuals had
no time for the past. Roger Fry, a member
of the Bloomsbury group, wrote in 1919 of
“the incurable optimism of memory” that
built an “earthly paradise out of the bore-
doms, the snobberies, the cruel repres-
sions and mean calculations” of the 19th
century. A less intellectual take was WC
Sellar and RJ Yeatman’s satirical history
1066 and All That, which was serialised in
Punch in 1930 and lampooned the booster-
ish imperial version of history.
And while nostalgia tends to be conserv-
ative, Tories, too, take potshots at it at
times. After the economic catastrophe
of the 1970s, growth had become a prior-
ity and Nicholas Ridley, Margaret
Thatcher’s environment secretary, de-
clared that he had “a recurring nightmare”
that the countryside would be frozen in
time by nostalgia, under “some conserva-
tion order or another”. This “ossified”
landscape would be little more than a
“green museum”.
Today’s Tory party is quite happy to
wallow in the stuff, although it is not much
help in shaping policy. Modern British
nostalgia contains several contradictory
themes: plucky little Britain fighting on
in the face of overwhelming odds; a great
global power; an open, adventurous, sea-
faring nation; a culturally homogenous
island free from the tensions that come
from diversity. The incompatibility of
these national stories helps to explain the
absence of a vision for post-Brexit Britain.
Rule, Nostalgia could do with a bit more
of an argument. The point that nostalgia is
always with us is swiftly made, leaving the
book without much momentum; and
given that its purpose is to throw new light
on British identity, it would have been
interesting to know whether the phenom-
enon manifests differently elsewhere. Yet
Woods selects and deploys her material
well, persuading the reader, in the course
of an enjoyable book, that a feeling full of
sweetness and sadness is also a dark and
dangerous force.Rule, Nostalgia
A Backwards History
of Britain
by Hannah Rose WoodsWH Allen, 394pp; £20‘Brexit — it’s Magna
Carta! It’s Waterloo!
It’s Agincourt!’ said
Jacob Rees-Mogg