This is a timely exploration of national identity in Great Britain over nine hundred years of history. Our attitudes to the nation state are changing - national assemblies in Scotland and Wales and growing pressures for regional assemblies. In his vigorous new survey, Professor Robbins provides the background to these changing attitudes. He considers the development as well as the possible disintegration of the sense of "Britishness" among the inhabitants of Britain and investigates how - and why - they have preserved their own national and regional identities across several centuries of co-existence.