Britain's Europe

Entertaining and cogently argued… an eloquent argument – Tony Barber * Financial Times *A dazzling perspective on the current EU referendum debate * Prospect Magazine *Like all truly stimulating and original works, this is a book worth reading even if one ultimately disagrees with the author’s conclusions, or if the time is not yet ripe for their realisation – Robert Gerwarth * Irish Times *Entertaining – Dominic Sandbrook * The Times *With supreme confidence, Simms distils 1,000 years of history into a simple constant: Britain’s role has always been to prevent the domination of the Continent by a single power…Britain, in other words, has always been part of Europe. To deny that fact is to ignore the past. – Gerard Degroot * The Times *In his spirited new book, “Britain’s Europe”, Brendan Simms, a historian at Cambridge University, argues that the whole notion of an island story is wrong. Britain’s history, he says, is above all about continental Europe…Mr Simms makes a powerful case. * The Economist *His book aims to demonstrate that the history of the British isles has never been an isolated one, and that “our island story” has always, in ­reality, been continental. – Mark Mazower * New Statesman *A fascinating, engaging book, which exemplifies how a balanced and mature long-term historical perspective might have informed present-day political policy – Joad Raymond * BBC History Magazine *Wide-ranging and thoughtful… a timely and important study that places Brexit and the difficulties of the EU in an illuminating historical context. – PD Smith * Guardian *

Brendan Simms is the author of Unfinest Hour (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize), Three Victories and a Defeat, Europe- The Struggle for Supremacy and The Longest Afternoon, which was published in 2014. He is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge.