John White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of five hundred years of history, politics, economics and culture as related to us by a selection of twenty-first-century British feature films. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war is a myth which millions of us still believe in today; ‘the United Kingdom’ is a quaint oxymoron for which tens of thousands are still prepared to die. British Cinema and a Divided Nation makes you feel strangely patriotic, that through passion, persistence and protest there is still something worth fighting for. As a result, it is highly recommended.

- Brett Gregory, Counterfire

“This thoughtful and thought-provoking study of contemporary British film situates its case studies firmly within their social, political, historical and cultural contexts, reading them collectively as expressive of a fractured national psyche. Whether mobilising the past or exploring the present, dealing with conflict or community, the films discussed in this book, ranging from wartime biopics to costume drama, art cinema to social realism, are compellingly presented as an especially incisive way of accessing and understanding the state of the nation.”

- Melanie Williams, University of East Anglia,