LAURA TINGLE, PRESENTER: Historian Simon Schama is probably best known for his sweeping television documentaries on Britain, America and art, as well as his many books.

He'll be visiting Australia next month to promote his latest book, Wordy, a collection of his writings covering everything from interview with rock musicians Deborah Harry and Patti Smith, to lectures on the future of liberal democracy, to food and cooking.

Simon Schama joined me from New York to discuss the particular lessons of history for Brexit and the Trump presidency.

Simon Schama, in your new book you reflect on confused national identity in England in the post war years. To what extent do you think those questions of national identity — separate from issues of immigration or populism — have driven the Brexit debate?

SIMON SCHAMA, HISTORIAN: In the mid late 1950s and early 1960s, because our memories were so... kind of sharply attuned to what the result of militant nationalism had been, namely the war, we thought, well... even if we had no illusions about the authority and power of the United Nations, we thought we weren't going to go through that again.

And if there was going to be some terrible conflict, explosive conflict, it would be between liberal capitalism and international communism.

So the sense actually of this tribal fury would be contained within... I don't know — sport, within football or in our case, cricket, so that it wouldn't actually be something which would surf the great roller-coaster of ethnic hatred ever again.

So in some sense, actually, it's caught naive professors like me, I suppose, slightly by surprise.

LAURA TINGLE: You've been of the way history has been used by the Brexiteers or twisted to back their cause. Can you give us some examples of that?

SIMON SCHAMA: It's a characteristic of Brexiter arguments to say, 'Well, if the worst happens and Britain leaves the European Union without a deal, we got through the Blitz, got through Dunkirk'.

This is an argument about the war.

First of all, actually, we're trapped in a kind of mad cage of patriotic nostalgia. But it's inevitably almost always an argument made by people who had no experience of the war for themselves. I was born in the very last months of the war and I'm 74. Most of people who talk about the wartime, 'we can all get through it' spirit, had absolutely no experience of that whatsoever.

So you can actually have a kind of — to me — a rather kind of toxic cult of patriotic nostalgia, which actually, essentially, is... it's the sort of... it appeals to the gut, it appeals to feeling, it appeals to emotions, it appeals to the movies of Dunkirk, rather than appealing to thought and to actual arguments about where Britain is and where Britain can go.

LAURA TINGLE: You've called Brexit the most spectacular acts of economic and cultural self-strangulation in its history.

If we think about where a Britain that has left the EU sits in the world economically and strategically, when was the last point in history in which it seemed so isolate.

SIMON SHARMA: It's extremely difficult to think of any point in British history where it's been so isolated. (laughs)

If you go back to the Middle Ages, we were part of a pan-continental Angevin empire. Before that, the Norman world, before that the Roman world.

In the 18th Century, even though I suppose there was a very strong sense of kind of truculent, bloody-minded imperialism, nonetheless we were knitted into a system of continental alliances.

There's never been a time, really, where we weren't deeply imbricated and, you know, ravelled up with the people with whom we most naturally trade — namely closest neighbours.

So it's an unprecedented... It's a willed kind of sense of our sovereignty has been lost, we've lost control.

I mean, the notion that during the 45 or so years, the four decades, of belonging to the EU, Britain has been somehow, kind of emasculated, neutered, diluted Britain is self-evidently ludicrous.

Nothing of the sort has been the case.

And some of the Conservatives — particularly the senior Conservatives like John Major and Michael Heseltine, Kenneth Clarke, when asked, "Well, would Margaret Thatcher have been a Brexiteer?" say — and I'm sure they're right — say "Absolutely not."

Margaret Thatcher liked to beat up on the Europeans because we were inside the EU. She would never have been as irrational as to actually cut our nose to spite our face, which is what's happening right now.

LAURA TINGLE: You know live and work in the United States and you've written extensively about the Trump presidency. Is the US more vulnerable to forces that would seek to tear down liberal democracy than the UK?

SIMON SCHAMA: Um... Yeah, that's a tricky one. You know, as I fly from west to east over the Atlantic Ocean and the other way around, a lot of us who do that think, well, you know, which place in worse shape?

And you'd have to to say that of course, the founding fathers in the United States implanted in the Constitution the possibility of a change. If Donald Trump is re-elected — and with any luck he won't be — but should he be re-elected, there's a good chance of that — he can't, unless he changes one of the amendments to the Constitution, I think it's the 22nd amendment, he can't be President for longer than two terms, whereas Brexit will be for a lifetime.

We're very, very conscious. America, after all, had established itself against what was thought to be — and was — the overweening authority of the king. So you know, they're still there, kind of chewing it over, I think, in their tombs, Madison and Hamilton and Jefferson and George Washington. Still looking after us, I think, actually. And I certainly hope that will be the case.

LAURA TINGLE: Finally, does history give us any examples of how we get out of this mess?

SIMON SCHAMA: Yeah, but you don't want to hear them, Laura. It's usually by conquest, surrender and the punctuation of different kinds of small-scale apocalypse.

So you don't really want to know that. But I'll tell you one thing, and it may or may not be reassuring — it's not reassuring, really — is the ultimate crisis which the world faces is of course the slow death... or death is hyperbole, but the extreme deterioration of planet Earth.

So out of impending catastrophe, may come — MAY come — a more benevolent attitude to cooperation.

LAURA TINGLE: Simon Schama, thank you so much for talking to us.

SIMON SCHAMA: You're very welcome.