A yearning process
Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History of Britain by Hannah Rose Woods WH Allen, 400 pages, £20
In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the British media took to invoking the Blitz spirit. Harking back to the Second World War, the phrase effectively urged us to “Keep Calm and Carry On”, disinfecting our much-coveted packets of pasta while NHS workers “on the front line” struggled against the virulent disease.
To many historians of wartime Britain, this kind of romantic reference to the Blitz – which destroyed homes, split families and massacred innocents – seems like bizarre collective amnesia. Yet it was employed by both the government and
