They sit off the coast of Europe in what James Joyce called the snot, green sea although slate grey is more accurate.
The two largest Islands, Britain and Ireland, have been joined together for the last few hundred years by conquest and called the British Isles.
But not any more. Don’t call them the British isles in Dublin; nor in Scotland where “British” is no longer an identity most people acknowledge.
Then what is British anyway? The English themselves are accustomed to wondering wondering what it all means.
Now Historian Norman Davies has written a new history that tries to put the present island identity crisis into a long perspective. “Britishness,” he suggests, is just one phase in a long narrative stretching back to the millennium before Christ, when the Celts gave the islands their culture and the Anglo-Saxons were running around in bearskins in Germany.
The Isles: their past, present and future is on this hour.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Historian Norman Davies