STATE-OF-THE-NATION BOOKS can often be unsatisfactorily abstract as their writers delve into shifting identities and evolving social trends, especially when looking back on Britain, and England, since 1945.
Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman and an important voice of the moderate left, sidesteps the problem by getting under the skin of a series of specific events framed as “stories of modern England” — the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, the repatriation of dead British soldiers through the Wiltshire town of Wootton Bassett, the Islamophobic attack in Finsbury Park, and more.
The excavation of these events is skilfully handled, but Cowley largely eschews “speaking for England” and makes only a vague attempt to
