The Green Ribbon Books

The Day Britain Died

Andrew Marr
Profile
1999

This study of the state of Britain in the immediate aftermath of devolution betrays its origins in an accompanying TV series. One can almost hear the author delivering his piece to camera as one reads it.

That Marr's engaging style conceals an awful lot of information packed into quite a short book is something one might expect from a journalist who would shortly become BBC political editor. That it also conceals some pretty radical conclusions might come as more of a surprise.

Marr presents himself as an expatriate Scot from a background steeped in traditional Britishness, and a comfortable citizen of the UK.

The Politics of Englishness

Arthur Aughey
Manchester University Press
2007

University of Ulster Professor Arthur Aughey turns his attention to the English question in this new study inspired by the ubiquity of the flag of St George across England during the 2002 and 2006 World Cups .

As in his 2001 study of the impact of devolution on the UK, Aughey's approach is to conduct an exhaustive survey of the literature on the subject.

Much of this literature is preoccupied with the 'peculiar lack' of any politically significant sense of English nationality, The most important examples being the work of Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Christopher Hill
Penguin
1972

Magisterial study of the left-wing of radical puritanism in England during the Civil War and the Commonwealth.

Hill describes a period of intellectual and social ferment that gave rise to a huge range of radical sects, Levellers and True Levellers, Ranters, Diggers and Quakers, and which left its mark on great writers like John Bunyan and John Milton.

For Hill, these ideas represent the germ of a deeper social upheaval, 'the world turned upside down' within what ultimately became a bourgeois revolution.

This Marxist reading has been subject to much criticism from later scholars, but this book remains a classic study of an inspirational period in English radical history.

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Paine: Political Writings

Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Thomas Paine, edited by Bruce Kuklick
Cambridge University Press
1989, 2Rev Ed 2000

Tom Paine was arguably the most important thinker in the English radical tradition and a significant figure in both the French and American revolutions. He transformed the art of political writing with a lucid plain style designed to appeal to the common people rather than the classically educated elite.

This useful anthology includes a number of his most important writings:

Common Sense (1776) - tract containing the first open call for the Thirteen Colonies of America to throw off their allegiance to Britain. At one time there was one copy in circulation for every five people on America.

The Crisis Number I (1776) - Famous pamphlet written while Paine accompanied George Washington's army in its retreat across New Jersey. Washington had it read to his men before crossing the Delaware. Its power is exemplified by the famous opening lines:

After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland

Tom Nairn
Granta
2000

Nairn, arguably the leading Scottish nationalist intellectual, greeted the creation of the Scottish Parliament with this bold polemic, predicting the break-up of the union and calling for the emergence of new English and Scottish civic nationalisms.

The book depicted Britain as 'Ukania' a contemporary counterpart to the Austro-Hungarian empire, in which an early-modern monarchy struggled to contain emerging nationalisms.

After Britain included an early dissection of Blairism, predicting that the Scottish Parliament would transcend New Labour's limited aims for devolution. That judgment is perhaps already being vindicated by events

The most significant of the wave of book-length essays that emerged in the wake of Scottish devolution.

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Renovation or Revolution? New Territorial Politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom

Edited by John Coakley, Bridget Laffan & Jennifer Todd

UCD Press

2005

 

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

With the pace of British-Irish co-operation in the peace process picking up in recent weeks, it perhaps an appropriate time to review this recent volume of essays, which looks at the changing relationships within and between Britain and Ireland as a result of devolution and the Good Friday Agreement.

There has long been a school of thought arguing that the dynamic of those changes will eventually result in the break-up of the UK, of whom the foremost representative is Scottish nationalist philosopher Tom Nairn.

That view is subjected to a robust challenge here by the University of Ulster’s Arthur Aughey, perhaps the leading academic exponent of the alternative thesis, that recent reforms reflect the continued vitality of the British state.

The Enchanted Glass: Britain And Its Monarchy

Tom Nairn
Radius, 1988

An incisive critique of the Monarchy and its role in sustaining the British establishment. Nairn sees the monarchy as the lynchpin of an oligarchy in which Westminster, Whitehall and the City of London all seek to contain popular democratic/nationalist demands in order to maintain a residual sense of global greatness.

Some of Nairn's targets; Trident - 'the Royal bomb', the 'pseudo-feudal socialism' of much of the Labour Party, appear even more well taken twenty years on.

Indeed, it has become ever more apparent that New Labour's early constitutional reforms were ultimately an attempt to shore up the system Nairn describes rather than challenge it. This book is arguably even more timely now than when it was written.

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The Isles: A History

by Norman Davies
Oxford University Press
1999

A grand attempt to tell the history of the British Isles from a post-unionist standpoint.

This book is ironically let down by some key errors on the Irish War of Independence period, the very events which ensured that the British Isles would no longer be co-extensive with the United Kingdom.

Nevertheless, the recognition that the history of the British Isles is not merely the story of the British state makes this study a milestone in historiography.

Reviews

Stephen Moss - Guardian Unlimited
Keith Robbins - Hnet
Ann Talbot - World Socialist Website

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The Tyrannicide Brief

The Story of the man who sent Charles I to the scaffold
Geoffrey Robertson
Chatto & Windus
2005

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The Tryannicide Brief explores the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, and the life-story of John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted the King and paid for it a decade later with his own life.

The death of Charles I has often been seen as nothing more than a settling of scores at the end of the English Civil War. Robertson argues that it was in fact a blow for human rights, establishing the principle that the head of state is not above the law.

Free-Born John

The biography of John Lilburne
Pauline Gregg
Phoenix Press
1961

The definitive biography of a neglected but decisive figure in English history, the Leveller leader John Lilburne.

Gregg's account focuses on the Levellers' fight for legal and political rights for ordinary people, a story which has many parallels with struggles for human rights around the world today.

Lilburne's repeated confrontations with authority were pivotal for the development of English common law. Gregg shows how he used propaganda and mass organisation in a way which made him arguably the first modern political activist, and the Levellers the first modern political movement.  The book is particularly good on the network of underground printing presses which sustained the Puritan opposition to Charles I.

Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the human struggle underneath the costume drama of the English Civil War.

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