The Slow Death of England: New and Notable Books

The fate of England is much in the news as popular resistance to mass immigration grows, limits on free speech tighten, the “special relationship” deteriorates, and the prime minister appears ever more feckless and out of touch. Some books on the history of that nation have appeared and are worth notice.

JFK was assassinated in November 1963. Readers may be surprised to hear that, after the Warren Commission carried out its hasty inquiry, Bertrand Russell led the formation in the U.K. of a committee under the heading, “Who Killed Kennedy?” Members included leading intellectuals Herbert Read, Kenneth Tynan, and William Empson, as well as noted Oxford and Cambridge figures, two of whom sparred vigorously in the press over the Warren Report (Hugh Trevor-Roper and Denis Brogan). The participation of distinguished professors ended up amplified in the press, even reaching Playboy magazine, which is why the affair appears in Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism, by Colin Kidd.

For three decades, Kidd writes, elite academics in England enjoyed a “golden age,” when the public cared about their opinions and they had the same status prominent clerics had during the most prosperous times of the Anglican Church. They had authority and prestige until the upheavals of the late 1960s and the Thatcherism that followed broke the ivory tower mystique (though many dons backed the Thatcherite position). Other episodes such as the denied tenure of Colin MacCabe (which echoed in theory circles in the U.S. for years) are told with detail and vigor. As debates over the elitism and bias of our own Tier One universities continue today and humanities professors undergo widespread scorn (mostly deserved), it is useful to look back to a time when academics played important roles in social matters and populist anger didn’t exist. A very good read.

In June 2016, right after 17.4 million people in Britain voted to end membership in the European Union (16.1 million opposed), the FTSE stock index immediately fell 8.4 percent and the pound hit a thirty-one-year low as investors in sterling sold quickly. It’s an episode in another history of national decline, Yesterday: The United Kingdom from Thatcher to COVID, by Brian Harrison. It’s a story more academic and less dramatic than Twilight of the Dons, starting where the latter left off and ending with the worldwide pandemic. We learn of the full entry of women into the Houses of Parliament, Tony Blair and the Iraq War, health and welfare programs, globalization and immigration, Thatcher and Reagan, Scottish nationalism, and the recession after 2008, which sent the United Kingdom into a six-quarter fall. Harrison doesn’t forecast doom—his book says nothing about the grooming gang abominations in the Midlands, for instance—but a tone of passive resignation runs throughout. One reads it and feels the memory of a mighty empire growing ever dimmer.

The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot, by historian A. G. Hopkins, is unsparing. “The specific purpose of the book is to explain the current malaise that now infects every aspect of British life,” we are told in the prospectus. For Hopkins, the condition is mostly all economic, the result of trends in manufacturing, finance, the “exaltation of private enterprise,” and “decimation of public services.” All along the way the government fails its citizens, he continues. The rise of Margaret Thatcher amounted to a “counter-revolution” after a period of “inflated prices and deflated aspirations.” From the fall of Thatcher to the crisis of 2008, the government let finance develop without regulation and gave us the recession. In just a couple of years, two million people lost their jobs while the affluent proceeded unscathed. When Brexit came along, unhappy individuals of all kinds and across the political spectrum saw an opportunity to express their anger and disappointment, but corruption and incompetence undermined the ensuing process. Here is where the nation is now: A poll in 2024 tallied only 49 percent of respondents who prefer living in Britain to any other place (down from 62 percent in 2013).

“There is a common misperception, fueled largely by the lingering after-effects of the Galileo affair, that the Catholic Church has been involved in a long-standing battle with science,” writes Daniel Kuebler in Darwin and Doctrine: The Compatibility of Evolution and Catholicism. It doesn’t talk much about England, but does recount what England’s most famous scientist of the nineteenth century said and how many English theologians responded. Initially, Catholic officials challenged the theory, insisting that the human soul never has evolved and never will evolve. Also, Church doctrine refused the conception of man as a creature of nature and nothing more. The Church didn’t engage in persecution, however, and only held a principled skepticism regarding certain aspects of the theory. Pope Pius IX worried about the spread of the idea that man descends from apes, but did not place Darwin’s On the Origin of Species on the Index of Prohibited Books. A Pontifical Biblical Commission established by Pope Leo XIII in 1902 acknowledged that evolution forced a reconsidering of Genesis, but noted, too, that Church Fathers had interpreted variously the literal and figurative meanings of those first sections of Scripture. Cardinal Newman weighed in, as did many others, some accepting the compatibility of evolution and Catholicism, others taking a hard line and speaking of heresy. Kuebler traces the debates over the decades to Humani Generis in 1950, which asserted once again that man is more than a material being and criticized the theory for its neglect of original sin, remarking that the theory was not entirely wrong, only incomplete. We end with Pope John Paul II, who “made a concerted effort throughout his pontificate to foster a fruitful dialogue between the Church and modern science.” The prose is smooth and clear, the narrative engaging enough to interest anyone who wants to know how to answer the question, “How can you believe in Adam and Eve and in the biological record?”

Finally, let me recommend two books from a series I have covered before in podcasts. It’s called Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers, a project of Princeton University Press. The books are small and handy, four by six inches, cloth, with handsome dust jackets. The volumes are translations of ancient classics, some well-known and others obscure, with commentary by distinguished scholars. Fourteen have appeared so far, and now the fifteenth and sixteenth: How to Be Stoic: An Ancient Guide to Keeping Calm, selections from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and How to Live: An Ancient Guide to a Happy Life, selections from Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. To have all sixteen in the series would make for an attractive lineup on a bookshelf, and the wisdom they impart is badly needed at the present time.

AP Photo/Ian Walton