THE WORLD OF TOM NAIRN BY JAMIE MAXWELL
WHERE to begin with Tom Nairn? There are three core texts: The Break-up Of Britain (1977), The Enchanted Glass (1988), and After Britain (2000). Collectively, these titles, with their various updates, introductions and postscripts, amount to more than 1000 pages. Then there are the shorter book-length essays or essay-length books, including The Left Against Europe (1973), Pariah: Misfortunes Of The British Kingdom (2002), and Gordon Brown: Bard Of Britishness (2006). Then there are the scattered flashes of journalism: columns for Question Magazine in the 1970s, commentary for The Scotsman in the 1990s, conversations with and observations for openDemocracy from 2001 onwards.
There’s more, of course. Nairn was a globe-straddling academic who taught and studied in Amsterdam, Italy, England, Ireland and Australia. His first piece for the New Left Review was published in 1962; his final public interview in The National in 2021. Between 1980 and 2010, he contributed 25 times to the London Review of Books. Nairn’s body of work, spanning six decades, is immense. No one wrote like Tom Nairn. No one thought like him. No one captured the overwhelming weirdness of British politics with the same caustic wit or depth of clarity.
