Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's Best

Selling History Magazine.

I'm Ellie Corthon.

Today's guest is the Cambridge historian, Professor Robert Tooms, who joined me to discuss

his new book, This Sovereign Isle.

The book looks at the history of Britain's relationship with Europe to put Brexit in

its historical context.

I spoke to Robert for the books interview in the January issue of BBC History Magazine.

So your new book looks at Brexit but from the perspective of a longer history of relationships

between Britain and Europe.

What made you want to write this book or perhaps made you feel like it was necessary to do so?

Our ideas about Europe are relationship with Europe.

The difficulties of our relationship with Europe, the whole European project itself and the

way people all over Europe respond to it is essentially based on an understanding of

the past and hence of the present and hence expectations about the future.

So although in theory, indeed it's been done, you could write a book about Brexit and endless

books about the EU which analyse them as political structures, as economic systems and so on.

I think you only really understand it fully.

There's a whole dimension of it that can only be understood as a reflection on the past.

Yeah, one of the central tenants of your book is of course that if you look at the past

then Brexit does become what you call historically explicable.

How so?

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