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** A FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR **

‘Rule, Nostalgia announces Woods as one of the most interesting new historians of her generation’ – Dan Jones, Sunday Times

‘Hannah Rose Woods explores how illusory and contested golden ages have haunted Britain since medieval times… Intelligent and eminently readable’ – Richard Evans, New Statesman (Book of the Day)

‘Our national story is so much stranger than we think: this book brilliantly insists that we look at it afresh’ – James Hawes, bestselling author of The Shortest History of England
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Britain is an island ruled by nostalgia, but nostalgia today isn’t what it used to be…

Longing to go back to the ‘good old days’ is nothing new. For hundreds of years, the British have mourned the loss of older national identities and called for a revival ‘simple’, ‘better’ ways of life – from Margaret Thatcher’s call for a return to ‘Victorian values’ in the 1980s, to William Blake’s protest against the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the Industrial Revolution that were fast transforming England’s green and pleasant land, to sixteenth-century observers looking back wistfully to a ‘Merry England’ before the upheavals of the Reformation. By the time we reach the 1500s, we find a country nostalgic for a vision of home that looks very different to our own.

But were the ‘good old days’ ever quite how we remember them? Beginning in the present, cultural historian Hannah Rose Woods takes us back on an eye-opening tour through five hundred years of Britain’s perennial fixation with its own past to reveal that history is more complex than we care to remember. Asking why nostalgia has been such an enduring and seductive emotion across hundreds of years of change, Woods separates the history from the fantasy, debunks pervasive myths about the past, and illuminates the remarkable influence that nostalgia’s perpetual backwards glance has had on British history, politics and society.

Rule, Nostalgia is a timely and enlightening interrogation of national character, emotion, identity and myth making that elucidates how this nostalgic isle’s history was written, re-written and (rightly or wrongly) remembered.

Publisher Review

Fascinating and timely, Rule, Nostalgia is an eye-opening history of Britain's enduring fixation with its own past * Jeremy Paxman * Our national story is so much stranger than we think: this book brilliantly insists that we look at it afresh * James Hawes, bestselling author of The Shortest History of England * Well-argued, timely and hugely entertaining. A great piece of popular history * Jonathan Coe, bestselling author of Middle England * A great, scholarly history, and so searingly relevant * Dan Snow, author of On This Day in History * An utterly eye-opening and enthralling debut, clearly laying out our uniquely British obsession with nostalgia. Required reading for anyone who wants to use the term 'culture war'... I absolutely loved it * Fern Riddell, author of Death in Ten Minutes: The forgotten life of radical suffragette Kitty Marion * A smart, entertaining and meticulously researched backwards look (quite literally) at Britain's history of looking over its shoulder. Deconstructs the lure of the fictitious 'good old days' and how they have been weaponised throughout history. Excellent * Otto English, author of Fake History * Outstanding. A thrilling, elegant and highly original interrogation of how we use our pasts * Musa Okwonga, author of One of Them: An Eton College Memoir * Nostalgia was once considered a terminal condition. Hannah Woods suggests that the culture needs to book itself in for a check-up. Provocative and well-argued, Rule, Nostalgia offers the diagnosis that might lead us to a cure * Matthew Sweet, author of Inventing the Victorians * A triumphal backwards tour through the history of Britain's relationship with its own past. This funny, sad, wise and brilliantly informative book is a crash course in the many pasts that have made our presents * Peter Mitchell, author of Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves *