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After a summer of political turmoil - which is still unfolding - we are left reeling and asking - who are we? Who are the British? And, increasingly, who are the English? Soon to divorce from the EU - and who knows, maybe even from the UK? - the nature of Englishness is now a cultural and political topic in the way it hasn't been for centuries. 

Theos hosted a conversation between two leading thinkers on this topic: Prof. Robert Tombs, author of The English and Their History; and Prof. Michael Kenny, author of The Politics of English Nationhood. 

Robert Tombs is Professor of French history at St John's College, Cambridge, and has worked extensively on the history of the relationship between the French and the British. He is the author, Isabelle Tombs, of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present, and also of The English and their History.

Michael Kenny is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London, and inaugural Director of the Mile End Institute. He was one of the co-editors of the Oxford Handbook of British Politics and is author of The Politics of English Nationhood.

Image by Jeff Buck from geograph.org.uk available under this Creative Commons Licence