Britain is a country haunted by its past. It is possessed by the memory of a golden age, a time long ago when this country was the most powerful on Earth. This is a film about what happens when politicians summon up that romantic vision; for a moment it gives them immense power but then they discover they have evoked forces they cannot control. The price they pay is to become imprisoned by their vision. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead III: The Attic
Some of the Colditz generation even set up private militias; a network of retired military officers who would take over the running of the country if law and order collapsed. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher took over a demoralised Tory party. The modern Britain the Conservatives had tried to build in the ’50s and ’60s had collapsed. In its place she offered a new vision: she too would modernise the economy and make it grow, but the wealth produced would recreate an older form of Britain. ibid.
He [Churchill] led the British people into a world of his own imagining. They were drawn by the power of his imagination into an idealised vision of Britain’s past. A dream from a world that was long gone. ibid.
One of Mrs Thatcher’s aims was to generate a new sense of pride in Britain’s past. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher soon established herself as a new kind of leader driven by a messianic vision. But her party didn’t realise the price the country would have to pay to be reborn in her terms. ibid.
The powerful historical forces she [Thatcher] had summoned up in Ireland were not under her control. ibid.
The past teaches you about life, my father once said. Gomorrah s3e7, bird, Sky Atlantic 2017
An expert is someone who knows a lot about the past. Tom Hopkins
History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself. Dana Arnold, Reading Architectural History, 2002
When we dispel the rosy glow of nostalgia from our past, there is little empirical evidence to support the idea it was a gentler, better time. History’s Greatest Myths s1e4: Society, History 2023