Skip to main content

Island Stories by David Reynolds review – how British history is shaping Brexit

Dreams of empire, blitz spirit, a country in decline … this crisp and concise book shows that competing visions of the past are driving the Brexit project

For diehard Brexiters, the most potent image of their project is the “clean break”. It is in itself a rather attractive notion, especially in our culture of personal make-overs and radical transformations. Brexit is the New You. It proposes a Year Zero and an Independence Day – points of origin at which a whole other story of British greatness begins. Like most revolutions, it imagines a sloughing off of history, especially, of course, the history of half a century of deep entanglement with the European Union. It offers a free programme of collective rehab, a political version of the Scientologists’ goal of “going clear”.

Yet one of the many incoherences of the Brexit project is that it cannot sustain even this rhetoric of a magical escape from the past. It proposes a giant leap into a glorious future but, as the Anglo-Irish philosopher Johnny Rotten snarled more than 40 years ago, “there is no future in England’s dreaming”. What is to follow from the great rupture has always been fuzzy. There is, instead, an awful lot of past.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JAiLYt
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more