Archive of Tom Nairn

Tom Nairn, who died on Saturday morning, 21st January 2023, made his name with a series of coruscating essays on the British state published in New Left Review and collected in the 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain.  Here, we republish Tom Nairn's classic account of the nature, and the twilight, of the British state.

At the height of the crisis of the 1970s Tom Nairn published his collection of essays The Break-Up of Britain, which soon became a key intellectual reference point for the Scottish and British left. Post-Brexit, could those same trends that Nairn predicted would lead to the break-up of Britain be returning? In this article, Scott Lavery asks what Nairn can teach us today.

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