Diary

Jeremy Harding: My ’68, 19 July 2018

“... had been dreaming the wrong dream. The June 1968 issue of OZ ended with a review by the young Tom Nairn of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nairn did his best to like the film but couldn’t hack it. It led back, he decided, ‘into the heart of the oldest, stalest kind of despair with the human state. The ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... of reckoning looms, the pro-independence camp may yet come to regret its rejection of gradualism. Tom Devine The​ Scottish government states that it is committed ‘to securing the earliest safe withdrawal of Trident from an independent Scotland. This includes the removal of all elements of the current system.’ In the event of a ...”

Scotland’s Dreaming

Rory Scothorne, 21 May 2020

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence 
by John Lloyd.
Polity, 224 pp., £20, April 2020, 978 1 5095 4266 6Show More
The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation 
by Scott Hames.
Edinburgh, 352 pp., £24.99, November 2019, 978 1 4744 1814 0Show More
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“... from the Scottish literary community for heresy. His book begins by quoting a letter the poet Tom Leonard wrote to an ‘inquiring editor’: ‘The one area I couldn’t touch would be contemporary Scottish writers, or the recent past. The place is too small, and I like to relax when I go for a walk.’Hames is challenging the belief that the affirmation ...”

Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Balmorality, 16 November 2023

“... this aggressive; they didn’t need to be. They built their fairy-tale castle a few miles east of Tom na h-Eilrig, the hillock of the deer trap, and mimicked the imagined rituals of the old communal order. Prince Harry wrote in Spare of being ‘blooded’ after his first stag kill. A ‘proper old school’ ghillie, Sandy, slit open the animal and ‘pushed ...”

The British Way

H.C.G. Matthew: Devolution, 5 March 1998

“... to expect and request more. Are we witnessing the ‘Break-up of Britain?’ In a famous essay, Tom Nairn described a Unionism rendered naked by having no more clothes to give away by concession. In this case, Unionism is not conceding devolution, and nasty consequences may flow from that. Gladstone was surely correct in his view that major ...”

The money’s still out there

Neal Ascherson: The Scottish Empire, 6 October 2011

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 397 pp., £25, August 2011, 978 0 7139 9744 6Show More
The Inner Life of Empires: An 18th-Century History 
by Emma Rothschild.
Princeton, 483 pp., £24.95, June 2011, 978 0 691 14895 3Show More
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“... learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom Devine, currently Scotland’s leading historian, targets myth – aspects of the past which have been either flamboyantly invented or furtively dropped down the memory hole. What are these tracts of their history which the Scots have distorted or ...”

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7Show More
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“... denied all responsibility. By the 1960s, the result was a ‘battered cliché-ridden hulk’, as Tom Nairn claimed when condemning Enoch Powell’s conjuring of England as a ‘mother country’ that had remained essentially unaltered through the entire course of the British Empire. Little England would often serve as an excuse for bigotry and wilful ...”

Nation-States and National Identity

Perry Anderson, 9 May 1991

The Identity of France. Vol. II: People and Production 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Collins, 781 pp., £25, December 1990, 0 00 217774 9Show More
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“... alternative to this vision of patriotic declension to a mildly sentimental pluralism came from Tom Nairn, who pointed out that it hardly squared with the monolithic devotion of the British to their monarchy – a devotion which had, if anything, intensified in the post-war period. Nairn’s study of the royal ...”

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5Show More
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“... it. The example he gives is the abluted Croatia of tomorrow. This is an argument first made by Tom Nairn about Bosnia, in much the same tension of grief and realism. The extension of Garton Ash’s range to the Balkans thus involves more than a geographical move. It represents an intellectual and moral enlargement. But by the same stroke, it throws ...”

Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair

Owen Hatherley: Jonathan Meades, 7 March 2013

Museum without Walls 
by Jonathan Meades.
Unbound, 446 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 908717 18 4Show More
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“... correspondent; he argues in Museum without Walls that taking up such a job helped destroy Ian Nairn, the pugnacious, melancholic writer and broadcaster who is his most obvious precursor. It’s telling that this book doesn’t appear courtesy of the Architectural Association or any of the other publishers you might have expected to show an interest, but ...”

Hated and Loved in a Breath

Jenny Turner: On Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 23 July 2026

History of a Revoluter: The Life of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon 
by William K. Malcolm.
Jetstone, 580 pp., £24.99, February 2025, 978 1 910858 36 3Show More
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“... feel the need of it – he had in Diffusionism a different ‘dream of redemption’, in a Tom Nairn phrase, with which to heal the ‘maimed past’. ‘Scotland’s salvation, the world’s salvation’, lay for Gibbon ‘in ultimate cosmopolitanism’. ‘Braid Scots,’ he thought, ‘may yet give lovely lights and shadows not only to English ...”

Land without Prejudice

Perry Anderson: Berlusconi’s Italy, 21 March 2002

“... England seems to have lacked such self-ironic reflexes: ‘Englishry’ – the gift of Tom Nairn, a Scot – is without currency in its land of reference. Italy lies at the opposite pole. In no other nation is the vocabulary of self-derision so multiple and so frequent in use. Italietta for the trifling levity of the country; italico – once ...”

The Undesired Result

Gillian Darley: Betjeman’s bêtes noires, 31 March 2005

Betjeman: The Bonus of Laughter 
by Bevis Hillier.
Murray, 744 pp., £25, October 2004, 0 7195 6495 6Show More
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“... by his informal editorial panel, his publisher John Murray and the odd couple of John Sparrow and Tom Driberg. Sparrow was a grammarian pedant, ‘a great which-hunter’, as Murray put it, while Driberg watched the tenses and any surfeit of sentiment like a hawk. ‘If that’s what heaven’s like it won’t be bad’ was, for Driberg, rather ‘in the ...”

The Divisions of Cyprus

Perry Anderson, 24 April 2008

“... mixture of times: post-dated in emergence, pre-dated in form. Pan-hellenism was in many ways, as Tom Nairn pointed out long ago, ‘the original European model of successful nationalist mobilisation’, producing in the Greek Wars of independence the first victorious movement of national liberation after the Congress of Vienna. Yet, he went on, ‘the ...”

Serried Yuppiedromes

Owen Hatherley: What happened to London?, 21 August 2014

Guide to the Architecture of London 
by Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward.
Phoenix, 511 pp., £16.99, July 2013, 978 1 78022 493 0Show More
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“... time; critics who are too young to have seen these being built can be much more complimentary, as Tom Cordell was in his recent documentary Utopia London. Other omissions – such as the complex, obsessive, monumental late work of Berthold Lubetkin in Bethnal Green and Bow – can also be attributed to the prejudices of the 1970s and 1980s, when it was widely ...”