Interview with Gavin Esler, author of How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations
Gavin Esler, author of How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations, recommends a fantastic range of books! Before jumping into the interview, please check out Gavin's book:
Review from Book Depository:
In the past, it was possible to live with delightful confusion: one could be English or British, Scottish or Irish, and a citizen/subject of the United Kingdom (or Great Britain). For years that state has been what Gavin Esler calls a 'secret federation', but without the explicit federal arrangements that allow Germany or the USA to survive.
Now the archaic state, which doesn't have a written constitution, is coming under terrible strain. The English revolt against Europe is also a revolt against the awkward squads of the Scottish and Irish, and most English conservatives would be happy to get rid of Northern Ireland and Scotland as the price of getting Brexit done. The pressures to declare Scottish independence and to push for a border poll that would unite Ireland may become irresistible.
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How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations
Can England and Wales find a way of dealing with the state's new place in the world? What constitutional, federal arrangements might prevent the disintegration of the British state, which has survived in its present form for 400 years?
How Britain Ends is a book about history, but also about the strange, complicated identity of Britishness.
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Q. Do you have a favourite smart thinking book (and why that book)?
I don’t have any kind of favourite book - I have different books for different moods and at different times. But in terms of smart thinking I have a whole stack of books which come to mind. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is one. He is a great synthesiser - he takes ideas and events and rearranges them in ways which make me think. Timothy Snyder's The Road To Unfreedom similarly impressed me as does David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and Linda Colley’s Britons. Joe Stiglitz also makes me think about the relationships between business, finance and citizens. But we should not under-estimate the smart thinking from novels and poetry. Johnathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is the most provocative account of the downside of following public opinion, for example. My new book How Britain Ends is designed specifically to make people think about what if anything it means to be British in the 21st century. Anything which makes me think - even if I disagree with it - is good. It’s brain food and brain exercise combined.
A fascinating whirlwind tour of the history of the human species, from cave paintings to the industrial revolution onwards. Provocative concepts delivered with effortless eloquence, well that's how well it reads anyway. (All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
A wake-up call that aims to restore our understanding of the basis of our way of life, from the author of international bestseller On Tyranny.
The past is another country, the old saying goes. The same might be said of the future. But which country? For Europeans and Americans today, the answer is Russia.
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It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say, or the Soviet Union in this way.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? This brilliant and seminal book examines how a more cohesive British nation was invented after 1707 and how this new national identity was nurtured through war, religion, trade, and empire. Lavishly illustrated and powerful, Britons remains a major contribution to our understanding of Britain's past, and continues to influence ongoing controversies about this polity's survival and future.
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Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos - give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift's savage satire views mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves.
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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
In this visionary work of contemporary history, Timothy Snyder shows how Russia works within the West to destroy the West; by supporting the far right in Europe, invading Ukraine in 2014, and waging a cyberwar during the 2016 presidential campaign and the EU referendum. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the creation of Donald Trump, an American failure deployed as a Russian weapon. But this threat presents an opportunity to better understand the pillars of our freedoms and face the choices that will determine the future: equality or oligarchy, individualism or totalitarianism, truth or lies.
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The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
David Edgerton's major new history breaks out of the confines of traditional British national history to redefine what it was to British, and to reveal an unfamiliar place, subject to huge disruptions. This was not simply because of the world wars and global economic transformations, but in its very nature. Until the 1940s the United Kingdom was, Edgerton argues, an exceptional place: liberal, capitalist and anti-nationalist, at the heart of a European and global web of trade and influence. Then, as its global position collapsed, it became, for the first time and only briefly, a real, successful nation, with shared goals, horizons and industry, before reinventing itself again in the 1970s as part of the European Union and as the host for international capital, no longer capable of being a nation.
Packed with surprising examples and arguments, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation gives us a grown-up, unsentimental history which takes business and warfare seriously, and which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsideration for the country and its future.
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Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837
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Gulliver's Travels
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Q. What's the most recent smart thinking book you've read (and how would you rate it)?
The two most recent smart thinking books I read are Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure and Peter Pomerantsev’s This is Not Propaganda. The are very different, both excellent, and yet both in a way touch on a common theme- how do we know what we think we know; how do we separate fact from convenient fictions. I wrote an earlier book called Lessons From the Top about formulas leaders use to tell stories. Pomerantsev’s account is also about the manufacture of story telling, shaped for modern audiences - a kind of up to date version of Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders. Fintan O’Toole impressed me because as an Irishman with a keen but affectionate eye on Britain, he performed a wonderful autopsy on the British body politic.
Review From Book Depository:
A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. A great democratic country tears itself apart, and engages in the dangerous pleasures of national masochism.
Trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact came to define the style of an entire political elite; a country that once had colonies redefined itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation.
(All links earn commission from purchases. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository:
When information is a weapon, everyone is at war.
We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump. We've lost not only our sense of peace and democracy - but our sense of what those words even mean.
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Great leaders have always understood the power of stories. Through the stories they tell, the most successful leaders educate, persuade and bring about change, but we rarely have the background knowledge to explore how they do so. In this hugely insightful guide to getting to the top, leading journalist Gavin Esler presents first-hand knowledge of the secrets of those who achieve power based on over thirty years' experience interviewing world famous figures from Bill Clinton to Angelina Jolie.
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Originally published in 1957 and now back in print to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, The Hidden Persuaders is Vance Packard's pioneering and prescient work revealing how advertisers use psychological methods to tap into our unconscious desires in order to "persuade" us to buy the products they are selling.
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Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
Fintan O'Toole also discusses the fatal attraction of heroic failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster. Now failure is no longer heroic - it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters.
A new afterword lays out the essential reforms that are urgently needed if England is to have a truly democratic future and stable relations with its nearest neighbours.
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This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality
As Peter Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter revolutionaries and pop-up populists, 'behavioural change' salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians, truth cops, and much more. Forty years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Russia - but the answers he finds there are surprising.
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Lessons From the Top: How Successful Leaders Tell Stories to Get Ahead - and Stay There
Introducing the questions every leader must answer - and the elements that the best stories must contain - Esler explains how creating a leadership story can promote success at all levels, whether running for the United States presidency or applying for a place at university.
Spanning fields from business and culture to the military and even taking in lessons from terrorism, Lessons from the Top offers a fascinating portrait of leadership in the modern world - and shows how the methods of the most powerful leaders could work for you.
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The Hidden Persuaders
A classic examination of how our thoughts and feelings are manipulated by business, media and politicians, The Hidden Persuaders was the first book to expose the hidden world of "motivation research," the psychological technique that advertisers use to probe our minds in order to control our actions as consumers. Through analysis of products, political campaigns and television programs of the 1950s, Packard shows how the insidious manipulation practices that have come to dominate today's corporate-driven world began. Featuring an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, The Hidden Persuaders has sold over one million copies, and forever changed the way we look at the world of advertising.
Vance Packard (1914-1996) was an American journalist, social critic, and best-selling author. Among his other books were The Status Seekers, which described American social stratification and behavior, The Waste Makers, which criticizes planned obsolescence, and The Naked Society, about the threats to privacy posed by new technologies.
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Q. Do you have a favourite childhood book?
A Favourite Childhood Book - again is hard to say. As a ten year old I adored Richmal Crompton and Just William. At 12 it was Sherlock Holmes and Challenger tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and Gulliver’s Travels which I thought was an adventure story, until as a teenager I started to get the satire. And then in my teenage years I became a big (and undoubtedly deeply boring) fan of Camus and also various short story writers, especially Irish and Russian writers.
Review From Book Depository
In Richmal Crompton's Just William the Outlaws plan a day of non-stop adventure. The only problem is that William is meant to be babysitting. But William won't let that stop him having fun with his gang - he'll just take the baby along!
(All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing) Review From Book Depository: This book contains all the investigations and adventures of the world's most popular detective, Sherlock Holmes. From 'The Adventure of the Gloria Scott' to 'His Last Bow' we follow the illustrious career of this quintessential British hero from his university days to his final case. His efforts to uncover the truth take him all over the world and into conflict with all manner of devious criminals and dangerous villains, but thankfully his legendary powers of deduction, and his faithful companion Dr Watson, are more than up to the challenge. (All links earn commission from purchases that help fund this site. Prices accurate at time of writing)
Just William
There is only one William. This tousle-headed, snub-nosed, hearty, lovable ball of mischief has been harassing his unfortunate family and delighting his hundreds of thousands of admirers since 1922. This wickedly funny children's classic features original inside illustrations by Thomas Henry, a ribbon marker and a specially commissioned foreword by Roddy Doyle. This delightful hardback edition will introduce William Brown and the Outlaws to a new generation of children.
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The Complete Sherlock Holmes
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Q. Do you prefer reading on paper, Kindle or listening to an audiobook?
I don’t read on Kindle. I spend too much time working on screens, so the idea of enjoying a novel or a book on screen doesn’t work for me. Also, with research books I confess I like to take notes and need to find things, so I often stuff paper in the useful pages. I have recorded an audio book - my own Lessons From The Top - but (another confession) I have never listened to an audio book, except maybe Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter which I listened to with my children. (It was great.)
Q. Do you have a favourite bookshop (and why that shop)?
I love independent bookshops. West End Books in West Hampstead is wonderful. Blackwell’s - especially the one in Edinburgh - is a delight. No Alibis in Belfast is terrific. Waterstone’s staff are always very helpful. I also adore Dussmann’s in Berlin - they have an extraordinary selection of books and music, and are brilliant. So many great bookshops - not enough time.
Many thanks to Gavin for recommending a fantastic range of books! Please don't forget to check out Gavin's book How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations
Daryl
Image Copyrights: Head of Zeus (How Britain Ends, Heroic Failure), Vintage Publishing (Sapiens, The Road To Unfreedom), Penguin Books Ltd (The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, Gulliver's Travels), Yale University Press (Britons), Faber & Faber (This Is Not Progaganda), Profile Books Ltd (Lessons From The Top), Ig Publishing (The Hidden Persuaders), Pan MacMillan (Just William), Random House (Sherlock Holmes).
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