This Sovereign Isle

confident … surprising and original … and humble … Tombs’s opening chapter, putting Britain’s relationship with Europe into a wider historical context, offers more insights than entire shelves of rival Brexit books. “Geography comes before history,” he begins. “Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary.” … Like all good historians, Tombs can be entertainingly bitchy [yet] all the time, with elegant wit, he punctures myth after myth – Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times *The time has finally come for the whole issue [of Brexit] to pass from the hands of journalists into those of historians. Robert Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge, has started the process of objective historical analysis with a profoundly thoughtful explanation of how Brexit happened, and why … Tombs has a witty turn of phrase and agreeably ironic style that means that he never descends into polemic … If journalism is the first draft of history, then This Sovereign Isle is its penultimate draft, and the best we will have for many years. – Andrew Roberts * Daily Telegraph *A short, punchy, eloquent statement from such a distinguished historian – Fintan O’Toole * The Guardian *Cambridge professor Tombs offers a fine first draft of history in this objective explanation of how and why Brexit happened. Tombs takes a witty, engagingly ironic approach to the false claims of Project Fear. – Summer reading * The Telegraph *A rare intellectual proponent of Brexit, Robert Tombs infuriates pro-Europeans-even more so because of his undeniable calibre as a historian … This Sovereign Isle argued that the Leave vote was inevitable as well as rational: the UK never fitted the European project. He understands this as a reaction to the traumas of the continent’s story - traumas that Britain’s distinctive journey has sometimes ducked … His theme - national identity in a fracturing world - has contemporary significance far beyond these shores. – The world’s top 50 thinkers, 2021 * Prospect *admirably independent-minded and well argued … should indeed be made compulsory reading for all Brexiteers – Richard Evans * New Statesman *To Remainers interested in reading a civilised & learned defence of Brexit, I highly recommend it – Tom Holland

Robert Tombs is Emeritus Professor of French History at Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. Most of his writing and teaching has been on French and European history and on Franco-British relations, for which he was awarded the Palmes Academiques by the French government. Since his foray into English history, with the publication of The English and Their History in 2014, he has become a frequent commentator on contemporary issues.

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