For Critical Quarterly - 'Brexit in fact and fiction: a few first drafts of history'

Nice to be back in the pages of Critical Quarterly – Volume 60, Issue2, July 2018, to be precise – with my essay on Brexit and fiction first presented at the University of Northampton in 2017. I set the scene like so:

“The EU referendum result split the nation near enough in half; defenestrated a Tory Prime Minister; confounded the ambitions of more than one of David Cameron’s putative successors; and, within a year, had created the conditions whereby a pension-aged Trotskyist with a career-long disdain for the European ‘project’ could entertain a real hope of leading the largely pro-Remain Labour party into government. As dramatic material this is worthy of Sophocles or Shakespeare. The challenge for writers of fiction, a perennial one, is whether or not they can improve on the facts already known by way of an imaginative treatment; or whether the facts are simply richer, stranger and more compelling when simply recorded in plain words…”