" The political erotics of imaginary domination and imaginary submission are the deep pulse of the Brexit psychodrama. Wherein lies the vicarious thrill of imagining a wealthy, relatively successful twenty-first-century European country as a marionette controlled by a continental puppeteer? What kick can a still quite influential, prosperous, largely functional country get from thinking of itself, as foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt would do in October 2018, as a nation incarcerated in a neo-Stalinist prison of cruel subjection? "

― Fintan O'Toole , Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain