Speaker - Geoffrey Wheatcroft

The debate on Britain’s departure from the European Union, before the referendum and ever since, has invoked the past: ‘Our Island Story’ and a thousand years of history. The Leavers, or Brexiteers, are especially prone to talking of ‘vassalage’ and medieval history, of the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, of the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), and of 1940, when the British stood alone. A powerful, palpable sense of nostalgia pervades the whole enterprise.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books as well as to newspapers and magazines in Britain. His books include The Randlords (1985), The Controversy of Zion (1996), andYo, Blair! (2007). He has been a regular visitor to the British Studies Seminar, talking more than once about Winston Churchill, a book on whose reputation and legacy he is finishing. Since being taken to a football game in Austin, he has considered himself a long-range Longhorn fan.