A review by uncleworry
Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History of Britain by Hannah Rose Woods

5.0

This book is spectacular. Hannah Rose Woods is a brilliant historian who really recognises her remit to use history to provide context for the present. The writing is fabulously entertaining and provides a genuine connection to the past; there’s very little sentimentality in the author’s voice, but the emotional link to those who lived before us is difficult not to feel. I think a large obstacle to how we usually access this is our romantic tendency to mythologise those who lived in these prior epochs, almost as another species with completely distinct facilities to think, feel and react to their environment - an environment that is indeed undeniably different to ours - but there’s something refreshingly honest, and indeed romantic in its own way, about seeing the inhabitants of that time as, more or less, us, transplanted into unfamiliar conditions. This philosophy recurs constantly throughout the book, nudging us to view our antecedents as contemporaries and to tune our judgements accordingly, sometimes with more generosity and sometimes with more scrutiny. These are - were - after all, people like us, with full access to the complete emotional spectrum, moral principles, motivations both benevolent and cynical and, as is the main thrust of the book, centuries of nostalgia of their own. When we are encouraged in this way to resist the crystallisation of the past and opt for a more dynamic view of its natives as extant cousins of ours, living and breathing in a relative present with its own past to make sense of and its own future (our present) to imagine, everything seems to make a whole lot more sense. This feeling propelled me through the book compulsively, constantly hungering for the next dose of it. I’m very comfortable calling this essential reading.