" The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from ‘heart of Empire’ to ‘occupied colony’. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. "

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