+++ skipped +++ Writer Robert Harris: ‘My England’s destiny is Europe and its strength is in the Crown’

What did it mean to be English fifty years ago and what does it mean to be English today? We ask the writer Robert Harrisauthor of several worldwide bestsellers translated into forty languages, from Fatherland to Enigmafrom The Ghostwriter to The officer and the spyboth of which Roman Polansky loved so much that he made them into films. The last one, Forgetfulness and Forgiveness (Mondadori, 444 pp., 22 euros, the translation is by Annamaria Raffo) – presented in Italian preview at the eleventh edition of Milano Book City, which ended with over 140 thousand visitors – Charles III, the new English king, also liked it very much.

The two met twenty years ago and since then Harris has sent all his books to the former Prince Charles. “I didn’t want to send him this too – he explains – because in England he came out a week after the queen’s death, but in the end I did”. “Five days later, I receive a letter listed in mourning, in which he invites me not to be embarrassed by the fact that Charles I has been decapitated (as he recounts in the book, ed), but that that episode is only one more incentive to suspense , because everyone is wondering what kind of king he will be now.’”

That beheading marked the culmination of the English Civil War and the manhunt to punish the two traitors who fled to America. “It is absurd that the only revolution that has taken place in England is not known by most. The king’s head was cut off, the lords and bishops were eliminated. Few know that for eleven years England was a republic, exactly 150 years before the French Revolution and 250 years before the Russian one. The English Revolution first broke out there and then survived in America. The fact that in the book he had the regicides hidden in that very country, in religious communities independent of the Crown of England, was a way of saying that there was the DNA of what America is today”.

“History may be erased, but history cannot be escaped,” Harris points out. He condemned the war in his other book, V2, encourages the Ukrainians’ struggle for their independence and believes “it is a moral imperative that Europe supports them”. “If we take what happened fifty years ago – he continues – England was in a strange position after the war, because it was within what would later be called Europe, but without participating in its construction”. This position continued and the advent of the Brexit he proved it. There is always, then, a hard core of British nostalgic supporters of British imperialism and their country’s independence. Brexit has actually been a wake-up call for all of us, even if we haven’t fully woken up yet. Our destiny is linked to Europe and this great fantasy that England should return to being a great world power is completely dead, it has no future”.

“The monarchy is the strength of my country”, specifies this writer who lives in Kintbury, in the county of Berkshire, west of London. “Everyone realized that the republic would not work the way it did at the time and I don’t think anyone thinks we can go back to it. The historian Eric J. Hobsbawm – with whom I spoke before he died – was right when he said that the most civilized countries in the world are those that have a regime of constitutional monarchy, because it is the best guarantee of freedom. The historical legacy has led to the strengthening of the current monarchy and the TV series “The Crown” proved it, since it served to consolidate the image of the best known royal family in the world as if it were a trademark”.