Tom Nairn: Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times: Selected Essays

Tom Nairn has been the most forceful and original mind to confront, de-mask and anatomise the British state. The perception that Great Britain was a multinational state and not a united nation had never quite been lost over the centuries, but it was Nairn who almost single-handedly hammered this truth into the skull of British intellectuals and campaigners until it became - as it is today -practically uncontested by the political class. NEAL ASCHERSON, London Review of Books For the last fifty years Tom Nairn has been one of Britain's most consistently provocative and influential voices. No other writer has left so deep an impression on mainstream debates about Scotland, Britain and nationalism. No other writer has so thoroughly interrogated the United Kingdom's post-war crisis and decline. Old Nations, Auld Enemies, New Times brings together, for the first time, the full span of Nairn's work, from his ground-breaking analysis of the British state in the 1960s and '70s to his more recent examinations of globalisation, the English question and Scotland's independence referendum. Nairn stands alongside the great Scottish intellectual and literary figures of recent decades. Old Nations is the definitive Nairn collection - and an indispensable guide for anyone looking to understand the current moment in Scottish and British politics.