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Heroic Failure : Brexit and the Politics of Pain by O'Toole, Fintan is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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"There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style" —The Times. A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book, from the author of Ship of Fools, about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. A great democratic country tears itself apart, and indulges in the dangerous pleasures of national masochism. England's favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling's 'If' , says that triumph and disaster are the same thing. It also enjoins the English to 'lose, and start again at your beginnings/ And never breathe a word about your loss.' Most modern English heroics are screw-ups, retreats or disasters: the charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, 'Scott of the Antarctic', Gordon of Khartoum, the flight from Dunkirk. The parallels with Brexit are obvious, but the problem is that the cult of heroic failure was developed precisely in an empire that could afford to play up its failures because it was so successful. Its pathos becomes bathos in a post-imperial world. Failure is no longer heroic – it is just failure. Brexit is essentially an ultra-Thatcherite project of deregulation. In its own bizarre

Who reads Heroic Failure : Brexit and the Politics of Pain?

Author

O'Toole, Fintan

Publisher

Head of Zeus Ltd.

Published

2019

Language

EN

ISBN

9781789541007

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Political Science, History, Law

Rating

4.5 / 5 (1,059 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14