These polemics against Brexit both fall into the same trap

It is good for historians to take the plunge into political writing, using their knowledge where they can to illuminate our present predicament. I declare an interest: I have tried it myself, on the other side of the debate. One has to be open with the reader as to one’s intentions and willing to expose one’s own opinions to the test of evidence. Otherwise, the result is something like these intriguingly confused and confusing books, which are really polemics against Brexit while purporting to be something else. Though very different in style and assumptions, their prejudices lead to the same intellectual dead end.

Bernard Porter is a distinguished historian of immigration and imperialism and the author of an excellent book demonstrating that few people in Britain bothered much about the empire – heresy in today’s climate of decolonisation.

His present style is a fruity hybrid of Queen Victoria and Mr Podsnap, with lavish use of italics, brackets and scare quotes. It reads as though it was dictated and never corrected.