Ghosts in the Palace
Tom Nairn, 24 April 1997
“... possession was never just the mixture of theatre and contrivance depicted by philistines like Walter Bagehot. It was more like an identity-fabric which, in the odd conditions of Empire-Britain, stood in for other forms of nationalism. With only a few years of hindsight it is obvious how such a moral structure can vanish far more utterly than places and ... ”