Refusing to treat the Royal Family as a jokey left-over from feudalism or a mere tourist attraction, Tom Nairn sees the monarchy as both apex and essence of the British State, and presents an analysis of the specific "backwardness" that explains this phenomenon. The monarchy has been symbol and guarantor of Great Britain's peculiar entry into modernity: the first-comer unable to break free from its origins, and still bound to these by patrician rituals which no later developer has had to imitate. Instead, the Anglo-British evolved a pseudo- modern national identity around the Crown and its constitutional framework - the "parliamentary sovereignty" of Westminster.
- ISBN10 0330311557
- ISBN13 9780330311557
- Publish Date 15 June 1990 (first published May 1988)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 24 October 2009
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Pan Macmillan
- Imprint Picador
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 248
- Language English