Graham Robb is the author of the new book The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History. His other books include The Discovery of France. He lives on the English-Scottish border.
Q: What inspired you to write The Discovery of Britain?
A: First, an emergency bicycle ride in 2018 after an Atlantic storm cut one half of Great Britain off from the other. Second, my decipherment of a startlingly accurate map of Britain created in the first century BC.
Q: How would you compare your experience working on this book with that of working on The Discovery of France?
A: The Discovery of France covered a shorter period, from the French Revolution to the First World War. The Discovery of Britain runs from “500 million BC to the next election.”
I occasionally used my earlier self (from infancy to early adulthood) as a witness of the past who either didn’t know what he was seeing or who saw things an adult would have missed.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I researched the book by digging as deeply as possible into particular places and moments rather than starting with broad surveys and foregone conclusions. Long cycle expeditions then served as what archaeologists call “ground-proofing.” In those forms of research, everything is surprising.
Q: The author Garrett Carr said of the book, “A history where everything is somehow still present and all at once, colourful and jostling along, like a tapestry that draws you close.” What do you think of that description?
A: No one lives their life in chronological order. We are always in the past, a little in the future, and almost never in the present.
Histories composed of separate blocks of time can be useful but profoundly misleading. They can also serve the purposes of politicians who, like Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, believe that “we should not try to unpick our history.”
Q: What are you working on now? Will you write another “Discovery of” book?
A: Both “Discoveries” were founded on several decades of accidental and deliberate experience. Another “Discovery” would require an additional half century of existence or a realization that all along I had been living a parallel life in a different part of the Earth. I doubt that in either case the results would have been of much value to a reader.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: This book, like The Discovery of France, was researched and ground-proofed with my wife, Margaret, who was born and grew up in the United States. This shared binocular vision made it easy to reconceptualize my native country as a foreign land.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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