From one of the most perceptive observers of the English today comes a brilliantly insightful, mordantly funny account of their seemingly irrational embrace of nationalism. Labyrinth Books and the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts invite you to join us!
England’s recent lurch to the right appears to be but one example of the nationalist wave sweeping across the world, yet as acclaimed Irish critic Fintan O’Toole suggests, it is, in reality, a phenomenon rooted in World War II. We must look not to the vagaries of the European Union but, instead, far back to the end of the British empire, if we hope to understand our most fraternal ally—and the royal mess in which the British now find themselves.
O’Toole depicts a roiling nation that almost ludicrously dreams of a German invasion, if only to get the blood going, and that erupts in faux outrage over regulations on “prawn-flavored crisps.” A sympathetic yet unsparing observer, O’Toole asks: How did a great nation bring itself to the point of such willful self-harm?
Fintan O’Toole writes for the Irish Times, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books. A winner of the Orwell Prize and the European Press Prize, and author of many influential and decorated books, he lives in Dublin and in Princeton where he is Lecturer in Irish Letters.
Co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books and Princeton University’s Humanities Council and Fund for Irish Studies.
