Mr Patten goes on to make a careful and unapologetic examination of five reasons why Europe has always been, for British leaders, the source of a continual ‘collective nervous breakdown’: the conviction, following the break-up of the British Empire, that Britain still has a global destiny; a sense of being ‘different and superior’, backed up by references to a largely idealized golden age; anxieties about any infringement of sovereignty and the ability to be ‘master of our fate, captain of our soul’; irritation at a Europe that appeals to reason rather than to the heart; and the certainty
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