Is human migration really a normal activity?

Halfway up the high street in Totnes, a small town on the river Dart in Devon, a modest stone is set into the edge of the road. It claims to mark the point at which Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, first set foot on this island. The grandson of the equally legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, Brutus was said to have been born in Rome; but, exiled from his birthplace, he travelled western Europe before finally settling here.

That the legend of Brutus was a ninth-century fantasy concocted by a Welsh monk named Nennius need not concern us. For Sam Miller, the point isn’t that Brutus was the first Briton, it is that he was a migrant, and his story ‘is another reminder of how normal it once was to eulogise rather than deny one’s migrant past’.