Following his highly acclaimed and best-selling book England: An Elegy (Bloomsbury Continuum), Roger Scruton now seeks to assess the basis of national sentiment and loyalty at a time when the United Kingdom must redefine its position in the world.

To what are our duties owed and why? How do we respond to the pull of globalisation and mass migration that are erasing the face of our country, to the rise of Islam and to the decline of Christian belief and the culture our ancestors built on? Do we accept these as inevitable, or do we resist them? If we resist them, on what basis do we build? In order to answer these questions, we need to revisit the foundations of our national experience.

Scruton surveys the British legacy - social, legal, cultural and political - and animates those sentiments which attach us to it. In so doing he answers the most pressing question - how do we include in our national identity the various sources of opposition to it?