Hubert Butler Essay Prize: what happened to Europe without frontiers?

The great Irish essayist Hubert Butler was a cosmopolitan, his sensibility being both Irish and passionately European. He situated Ireland squarely in the main current of European history, whereas England occupied a kind of eccentric tributary, or even backwater, of its own making. Thus, the vote for Brexit would not have surprised him, writes Roy Foster who judged the inaugural Hubert Butler Essay Prize this year.