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TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
 
My sampling strategy raises a number of questions. To begin with, the elite-mass 
distinction is, sociologically speaking, loose. This is by design. Rather than differentiating 
between policy and cultural elites, or between elites and sub-elites, or between different types of 
masses, I simply collected texts that can be credibly described as much talked about, highest 
circulating, must-read, bestselling, or most watched, the theoretical principle being that elite and 
mass publics are “co-authoring” the national identities contained therein. The former’s political 
domination over the latter – even as “mere” consumers of texts – is thus an empirical question.
Next, the term “British” was invested with modern meaning through imperial projects 
dreamed up in England – from the seventeenth-century colonization of Ireland to the 1707 Act of 
Union between England and Scotland and its subsequent westward enlargement into Ireland in 

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1800. Always centred on London, this union of unions was furthermore constitutionalized as a 
multinational, polyglot, and hegemonic empire whose patterns of historical development bear a 
resemblance to similar polities elsewhere.
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The Britain I analyze in this book, however, refers to 
its post-1945 iteration – what Edgerton (2018b) calls “national UK.”
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This is in line with 
Gaskarth’s textbook definition of Britishness: an overarching national identity shared by many 
members of the UK’s sub-state nationalities within the UK as a polity (Gaskarth 2013, 197–8n1; 
cf. Schnapper 2011, 3–4; more generally: Gilroy 2004; Ward 2004). 
One advantage of this definition is that it is sufficiently sensitive to the variability of both 
“British citizenship” and “national UK” in the period under study.
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Indeed, the focus on national 
identity categories must not preclude paying due attention to how non-national categories 
become articulated within a British “we.” That being said, the reader will rightly inquire about 
the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo or, in nod to a proper “four nations” 
approach, the Swansea-based South Wales Evening Post and Scottish history textbooks. Why 
produce another study that treats the English as the British nation rather than as a British nation 
(Gamble 2003, 3)? An equally strong case can be made for a less print-centric archive, not least 
because radio and, from 1970 onwards, television were at least as popular as movies.
41
So, where 
are documentaries, soap operas, sitcoms, the FA football cup finals, and cooking shows? And 
why not sample mass discourse from Mass-Observation, too?
My defence here rests on both principled and pragmatic reasons: principled, because my 
analysis deliberately privileges England and, more specifically, London as the dominant site for 
the discursive production of national UK; pragmatic, because an inductive recovery of a 
repertoire of ideas from which the postwar elites and masses drew to identify themselves as 
British is time-consuming even for a single year, much less for six. Doubtless, adding the 

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Liverpool Echo, the BBC’s To The Manor Born and That Sinking Feeling, and Bill Forsyth’s 
Glaswegian comedy film would have enriched and diversified the corpus of texts for 1980. But it 
would also have required hundreds of more coding hours. (The multimodal nature of discursive 
meanings contained in film and television suggests that a single scene might contain dozens of 
relevant references.)
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As for ordinary people-authored texts from Mass-Observation, no such 
material exists for this particular year – the project was discontinued in the mid-1960s and was 
revived only in 1981. So, while I would agree that the historical documents I use are far from 
optimal, I would also say that optimal sources do not exist for the issues explored in this book. 
The reader will note that my analysis heavily intersects with some social identities, 
specifically those of privileged white men of a certain age and class. Among the leaders whose 
speeches are examined here, for instance, all but one were white men and all but one were 
Oxford-educated. The rest of the corpus is thankfully less Oxonian, yet there, too, the 
overrepresentation of white men is nearly as overwhelming with regard to both authors and 
characters.
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But locating the discursive imagination and articulation of a nationalist UK in its 
white “malestream” is not necessarily a methodological shortcoming since it gives me an 
opportunity to apply and evaluate select ideas drawn from feminist and postcolonial scholarship. 
From the bomb to assorted invasions and reinvasions, postwar British foreign policy produced 
and reproduced gendered hierarchies not only “abroad,” as between the West and non-West, but 
also “at home,” as when some leaders feminize and emasculate their opponents by calling them 
weak, risk-averse, or backward (McClintock 1995; Doty 1996a, chap. 5; Doty 1996b; Webster 
2005; Basham 2018). 

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