The Guardian – Simon Schama
“So it is exactly at a time when we are being asked to make painful, even invidious, distinctions between the inessential and the indispensable in our public institutions: that we need history’s long look at our national makeup. This is not an insular proposal. The way Britain has conducted itself in the world beyond the shores of Albion, for good as well as ill, is integral to the self-examining story. How European are we; how Americanised in our habits and strategies? Why does Hong Kong pretty much run the world? There is no hope of answers to those kinds of questions without history’s help.”(more)