Who Are We Now Stories of Modern England [Audiobook]

And in doing so, he shows the common threads that unite them, whether it is attitudes to class, nation, identity, belonging, immigration or religion. He also examines the so-called Brexit murder in Harlow, the haunting repatriation of the fallen in the Iraq and Afghan wars through the town of Wootton Bassett, the Lancashire woman who took on Gordon Brown and the flight of the Bethnal Green girls to Islamic State, fleshing out the headlines with the very human stories behind them. By looking at these stories in vivid and often moving detail, Cowley tells us something important about what it means to be human in the age of globalisation. Moreover, he offers a clear and compassionate analysis of how and why England became so divided and the United Kingdom so fragmented and how we got to this cultural and political crossroads. Most importantly, he shows how the pandemic revealed the best of who we are and why there is genuine hope for the future in an era of heightened English national self-consciousness.