CO is back, with a dream guest for Dan and Kasia: Professor Patrick Wright, author of On Living in an Old Country and The Village That Died for England, joins us for an urgent and vital conversation about Englishness, heritage, national decline, landscapes, Brexit and Reform, historical memory, and social and cultural disintegration.

This is a conversation about "the direly persistent English question" - one which will not go away.

"I don’t even have a history O’level - history came to me, rather than me coming to it,” Patrick tell us, taking us on a fascinating journey beginning in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher appealed loudly to “tradition”, while ripping up norms that would ensure many things would never be the same. We discuss why politics often amounts to, in Patrick’s words, “conjuring with the bones of the dead”, and why the telling of our history is so often framed in terms of crisis: as Heritage in Danger.

How does the landscape shape our idea of the nation, and vice versa? We chew over some great symbolic moments - “radioactive anecdotes” like the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree, the Crooked House pub fire, Foot and Mouth, Dutch Elm disease (“the whole landscape was like a cemetery”), and the elevating of HMS Mary Rose from the sea bed after 450 years.

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Read Patrick's brilliant books:

On Living in an Old Country (1985) 

The Village that Died for England (1995)

The Sea View Has Me Again (2021)

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