“What did the Romans ever do for us?” Recently, one of my comic heroes passed. Terry Jones, the (very!) creative director of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and actor in numerous Python skits, has made his final curtain call. In The Life of Brian he played Brian’s mother and the phrase that ‘she’ uttered: “He’s…

How easily we take the notion of ‘nationhood’ for granted. “We are a nation,” we say, and it seems so obvious that it is hardly worthwhile discussing. Yet, it may come as a surprise to learn that the ‘idea’ of ‘the Nation’ has come under a veritable avalanche of scholarly debate in the last forty…