The Britannias: An Island Quest
Alice Albinia
(Allen Lane, £30)
A LICE ALBINIA begins her sparkling new book by outlining a problem with conventional histories of Britain. They are written, she writes, ‘as if the large island in the centre is what matters’. Even the official terminology—the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—neglects so much by focusing on the ‘mainland’. The author wants to offer a corrective, to tell the story of a nation of islands, rather than of an island nation.
Her quest follows a decade of collected ‘voyage tales’. Over 14 chapters—and her youngest daughter’s life so far—she amasses autobiography and archipelagic anthropology, travelling from the largest atoll to islands since engulfed by Britain. Having lived in—rather than on—Orkney, as well as journeying by fishing trawler, horse-drawn cart and foot, both to and across countless other isles, she comes to embrace the mythology of the women who went before her.
The author creates a history that
