This chapter recapitulates the book’s main intervention: imperial nostalgia as a structuring element of national life, culture and politics, and as the connective tissue between popular understandings of British history and reactionary politics. Adverting to John Everett Millais’ painting The Boyhood of Raleigh and its postcolonial refiguration in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, it argues that the willed delusion of innocence, central to the imperial project, is just as central to our current relationship to empire and our failure to come to terms with our national history. Noting the immediate contexts of the book’s production amidst the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy and COVID-19, and the particularly charged circumstances of 2020–1, it suggests that a first step towards a healthier relationship with the past might be the promotion of historiographical literacy – a wider popular understanding of how history is written and how it is invoked or enlisted in the service of various politics.