This year sees the ninetieth anniversary of the publication of a book called The Strange Death of Liberal England by the Anglo-American historian George Dangerfield. Though the title was referring to the British Liberal Party before the outbreak of the First World War, in a broader sense it implied the correlated values of a more general political philosophy, including the germs of the recently-born welfare state. So, far from dying, this new liberalism would over the coming decades infiltrate and colonise almost all British political parties. Even as the British Empire continued to expand after the war, these values remained a powerful vector for those that governed Britain: of the power of reason, of negotiation, of law, of accepting people – even opponents – at face value. More than anything else, it spoke of a gentlemanly optimism that could always detect a glimmer of light at the end of the longest tunnel. It was this spirit that enabled the British people to survive the bloodshed and impoverishment of two world wars, the second of which destroyed the remains of the Empire and saddled unborn generations with a self-replicating debt mountain which, in coded debentures, probably remains concealed in British current accounts to this day. The main point was that the British spirit, with its English core, rather resembled a buoyantly liberal plastic duck, for it always righted itself.

There was a moral continuum that co-existed with some of the worst of the late-imperial atrocities in Palestine, Cyprus and Kenya. Throughout there was always a voice of decency that spoke of a good England that stood for honour, and uprightness, and duty. The men and women who embodied these values were never numerous, but they were there, and they were audible, if only barely, the voice of conscience that spoke to others, an echoing morality that ensured that all was not quite lost.

The very year that Dangerfield’s masterpiece appeared  in 1935, the English statesman Thomas More was canonised on the four hundredth anniversary of his martyrdom by beheading at Tower Hill. He was not in our sense a saint, for he dealt ruthlessly with Protestant dissidents and applauded their incineration at the stake. However, his idealised vision for mankind was revealed in his work, Utopia, a perfect society in which the barbarity of capital punishment did not exist. But it did in his world, as he was to discover, in the terrifying dystopia created by Henry VIII.