ABSTRACT
When, in 1963, Encounter devoted a special number to England ‘face to face with its destiny’, it gave it the provocative but significant title ‘Suicide of a Nation?’ 1 National introspection was then the fashion, and in some quarters the wind of masochism was blowing at gale force. There was a mood of anxious self-questioning. Was John Bull getting like the character in John Osborne’s The Entertainer whose jokes nobody laughed at and whose opinions nobody wanted to hear? Even those who refused to look back nostalgically at the past were gloomy and worried about the future. The death of Churchill in 1965 seemed an event of symbolic significance. It brought the islanders brutally up against the fact that a page of their national and imperial history had been turned over, whose glory could never return. While the enormous cortège wound its way through London to the tolling of the bells of St. Paul’s, the whole country mournfully reflected that it had lost a part of itself for ever.
