Tom Nairn

Tom Nairn was the author of The Break-Up of Britain and The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy. His work in New Left Review in the 1960s, along with that of Perry Anderson, gave rise to what became known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis, which argued that many of Britain’s failings were the result of capitalist development that came too early and wasn’t accompanied by a bourgeois revolution that would have resulted in a modernisation of state institutions. Many of the pieces he wrote for the LRB considered the same issues: nationalism, the nature of what he called the Ukanian state and the hold of the monarchy.

Diary: On Culloden

Tom Nairn, 9 May 1996

On 16 April, the anniversary of the Battle of Culloden:

Wanting to Be Special

Tom Nairn, 21 March 1996

Writing in the London Review of Books in 1994 (8 September) I was incautious enough to make some remarks about alternatives to Eurocentrism that history might have generated. For example Progress, like Homo sapiens himself, might have erupted out of Africa rather than from the areas north of it. In which case, instead of indulging in what Edward Said calls Orientalism, there might well be present-day pallid-skin observers – ‘fulminating over Septentrionalist delusions about colourlessness: the vacant brain-pans supposed natural to the pigmentally-challenged, with their slime-grey eyes, ratty hair and squeaky-voiced irrationality’. Or again, industrialisation might conceivably have emerged in primarily Chinese shape – from the human Middle Kingdom or heartland, rather than the remote archipelago-coast of Europe. Had this happened, there would today be critics on both sides of the 2000 AD development gap (no doubt differently dated) contorted with guilt and indignation over the romantic delusions of Occidentalism.

Letter

Breaking-Up

24 August 1995

It is truncating my article to the point of distortion to suggest as Tam Dalyell does (Letters, 21 September) that it assumes most Scots ‘now want the break-up of Britain’. No such assumption or statement appears there. What the majority certainly appears to want is a degree of collective responsibility for its own affairs – approximately along the lines now advocated by Dalyell’s own Labour...

Upper and Lower Cases

Tom Nairn, 24 August 1995

Next time it will be different. Or so almost everyone in Scotland now believes, as they look forward to another election and back over the long trail of wreckage from 1979 to the present. The Conservative regime began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue movement, which can hardly fail to bring about parliaments in Wales and Scotland, as well as more European integration.

On the Threshold

Tom Nairn, 23 March 1995

Hyndford Street is a brick-built working-class row looking like hundreds of others. Yet it is to this terrain that the almost unbearable nostalgia of Van Morrison’s music always returns. The outside world now mainly sees Protestant Belfast in terms of Ian Paisley Snr, a man who believes that bridges are built primarily to let the Devil in. But the bridges of Morrison’s music have connected Hyndford Street outwards to a strange semi-mystical realm of angels, children and (ultimately) the Calvinist Nirvana of clear water and silence – Hymns to the Silence was his last double album:’

The organisers of the Festival of Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s...

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Throughout this book, the poet Douglas Dunn provides epigraphs and quotations. His final contribution occurs in the last section, ‘Epilogue: The Last Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom...

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I was just beginning to write about 1968 when I learned of the death in New Orleans of Ron Ridenhour, the GI who exposed the massacre at My Lai. He was only 52, which means that he was in his...

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Pallas

R.W. Johnson, 7 July 1988

Tom Nairn has, for many years, been pondering the peculiarities of the British state with impressive intelligence and originality. His earlier work, The Break-Up of Britain, remains a landmark...

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