Early in the Second World War, George Orwell claimed in his survey of Englishness, The Lion and the Unicorn, that ‘England is perhaps the only great country where intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’. It might be truer to say in the early twenty-first century that English intellectuals were ashamed, not of their nationality, but of their nationalism. English nationalism, not without reason, was seen as the property of skinheads, racists, football hooligans and drunken squaddies. A history of violence, domination and xenophobia made it radioactive. But it did not make it go away.
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