RULE, NOSTALGIA charts Britain’s obsession with the past – for better and worse

On the day of writing this review of Hannah Rose Woods’ Rule, Nostalgia, it was reported that the Home Office has decided to stall the rollout of its programme of post-Windrush-scandal staff training on the impact of Empire on immigration, over fears of the potential negative impacts of exposing civil servants to the realities of Britain’s colonial past. This attempt to sanitise and control our memory of recent history feels an entirely appropriate backdrop against which to extol the virtues of Hannah Rose Woods’ excellent analysis of the British public’s rearward gaze.

Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History Of Britain is just that: starting in the present with debates about statue-toppling and trundling back through the last 500 years to provide an enjoyable study of how nostalgia has been used as a weapon by the establishment at times, a comfort blanket for the masses at others. The mourning of supposed golden ages gone by is no modern phenomenon – Woods explains how rulers throughout the last five centuries, from Thatcher to Henry VIII, have sold to the public grand visions of restoration.

For all that such catalogued manipulation of the public consciousness might provoke cynicism in a reader, Woods handles her topic adroitly and with balance (albeit from a particularly Anglocentric perspective), presenting a fascinating depiction of Britain’s “yearning for impossible satisfaction”.