Neal Ascherson

In 2019, Boris Johnson became prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In 2020, he shrank into being prime minister of England. For the second time in less than seven years, the union is in trouble. But this time the problem needs a new question. Forget: ‘Should Scotland be independ­ent?’ The Scots will take care of that. Ask instead: ‘Who in the rest of Britain needs this union with Scotland? And why?’

Harry Rée wanted his British audience to understand that the French men and women who had taken part in the Resistance were not superhuman. ‘What I shall try to get across,’ he told a symposium in 1973, ‘is the complete and crushing ordinariness of the people I worked with in France.’

The Monuments Men were interested in stone, bronze and painted canvas; the Acquisition of Foreign Publications was hunting paper. Even so, the boundary between agencies, let alone between agencies and marauders, looters and desperate civilian squatters, was often unclear and disputed.

Like sturgeons and swans in medieval England, public information began as royal property. Today, we understand more vividly than ever before that information is also a commodity: I have it, you don’t; if you want it, you must pay me for it; if you don’t, I will use your lack of it to control you. Against this, and very reluctantly, a public ‘right to know’ has been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.