“In early August, I took a train to Melton and walked the last mile or so to Sutton Hoo. In British politics, the summer of 2019 feels like another prelude to conflict with our European neighbors. Since he became Prime Minister, in late July, Boris Johnson has steered the country toward leaving the European Union, without a deal, at the end of October. In Brussels, officials acknowledge that this is now the “central scenario.” There is talk of negotiations, but no one believes there is much point now. Nostalgia for 1939 and Britain’s privations, and ultimate victory, in the Second World War are rivets in the world view of the most ardent Brexiteers. In 2014, Johnson wrote a biography of Winston Churchill, which repeatedly cast Anglo-Saxon liberalism as fundamentally at odds with the bureaucratic, centralizing impulse of the Third Reich, or, as Johnson had it, “an infernal Nazi EU.” On Downing Street, Johnson has set up a “war cabinet,” which he chairs himself, to deliver Brexit regardless of the consequences for the population or the economy. There is a nationalizing myth of Britain’s long history as an island—that it has made us more free and more resilient—when the facts in the ground invariably argue the opposite: that we have always been attached, dependent, part foreign.”