Woods debut 'debunks' British past for W H Allen

The first book from cultural historian and "University Challenge" champion Hannah Rose Woods has gone to W H Allen. 

Editor Suzanne Connelly acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Rule, Nostalgia: A Backwards History of Britain from Charlotte Merritt at Andrew Nurnberg Associates. It will be published in hardback, e-book and audio on 12th May 2022. 

“Rule, Nostalgia will take readers on an eye-opening tour through six centuries of an obsession that has been likened to a national pathology: Britain’s fixation with its own past,” the Ebury imprint said. It unpacks the nostalgia for Britain’s “simpler, better ways of life” from Margaret Thatcher’s call for a return to Victorian values to William Blake’s railing against the Industrial Revolution. 

“Cultural historian Hannah Rose Woods will separate the history from the fantasy, debunk dangerous and pervasive myths about Britain’s past and explore the ways in which nostalgia has historically been mobilised in Britain across the political spectrum, from the radical left to the nationalist right, for both good and ill,” the blurb reads. 

Woods said: “I’m absolutely thrilled to be working with Suzanne and the team at W H Allen. Nostalgia is central to human experience, although ever-more important as we search for symbolic roots in an increasingly dislocated world. It has never felt more urgent to interrogate our relationship with nostalgia, and the ways in which Britain remembers its own past, but I also want to move beyond our current culture wars and explore the nostalgias of earlier periods of history.” 

Connelly commented: “Many long to go back to the ‘good old days’ – but did the ‘good old days’ ever really exist? There’s no time like the present to interrogate the long history of Britain’s often rose-tinted fixation with its past. Hannah is a truly exciting young cultural historian and I’m delighted to be working with her on Rule, Nostalgia. This is a timely and illuminating book on national character, emotion, identity and myth making that will help us to understand Britain: past, present and future.”   

Rose Woods is a cultural historian who is focused in the history of people’s emotional lives. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she taught modern British history, and in 2016 was captain for her college’s successful team on “University Challenge”. She has written on history, politics and culture for various publications such as New Statesman, the Guardian, History Today as well as appearing on numerous podcasts and radio shows.