This massive collection of essays by 43 different authors, including seven lords, four baronesses, one dame and three knights of the realm, may be the nearest we will ever get to a semi-official reflection on the causes and consequences of Brexit. Its editor, Sir Anthony Seldon, is honorary historian at 10 Downing Street and has written definitive works on successive 21st-century British administrations.

Yet the phrase “English nationalism” appears precisely once in its 600 pages – in a glancing reference to the line taken by the Daily Mail during the referendum campaign of 2016. Strikingly, while there is a fine essay by Aileen McHarg called On Scotland, there is none called On England. There is no attempt to provide even a broad overview of the tensions, contradictions and anxieties within the part of the UK where Brexit was won: non-metropolitan England. For much of the political and intellectual establishment, it seems, Englishness is still the condition that dare not speak its name.

This absence matters, not just to the understanding of the recent past, but to the immediate future of the UK. It evades the most urgent question: why, when even many of those who voted for Brexit now regard it as a failure, is the man who did most to make it happen nonetheless a plausible contender to be the next prime minister?

Peter Kellner shows, in his incisive contribution, that a third of those who voted to leave now say it has been a failure and, startlingly, a quarter of that cohort say Nigel Farage is “very” responsible for their disappointment. Slightly more of them blame Farage than blame the European Union itself. Yet Farage is still setting the agenda in English (and to some extent in Welsh) politics.

But if a distinguished contemporary historian such as Seldon doesn’t feel it’s worth trying to understand the nationalist impulses that led to Brexit, then Farage’s success also becomes impossible to explain. The collection doesn’t even have a specific essay on him – making it, if not quite Hamlet without the prince, perhaps a Punch and Judy show without Mr Punch.

That Brexit is indeed an objective failure is hardly worth denying. The most recent independent study, from Stanford University, finds that by 2025 Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8% compared with what it would have been. Investment shrank by between 12% and 18%, while both employment and productivity were reduced by 3% to 4%.

For all their blather about the dawn of the new golden age, intelligent Brexiters pretty much knew that something like this was going to happen. What they really thought was that the economic pain was a price worth paying for political renewal. Taking back control was, as the winning slogan had it, the actual point. And there might even have been some nobility in this – there is more to life than economics.

But as the jurist and historian Jonathan Sumption puts it in a withering introduction to the book, “Britain’s own ability to exercise ‘control’ over its own fate is inevitably more limited outside the EU”. The UK is still profoundly affected by EU decisions but it has no say in them. As for immigration – seen by many voters as the tangible evidence of lost control – Migration Observatory director Madeleine Sumption reminds us in her essay that it actually rose to record levels after Brexit, which thus failed “spectacularly to deliver on its clearest promise”.

If voters traded growth for sovereignty, they got a bad deal on both sides of the equation. Brexit did not herald the re-emergence of a liberated governing class whose brilliance had been occluded by continental clouds. Amusingly, the pro-Brexit former Tory MP Conor Burns writes in his essay that Simon Case, the cabinet secretary appointed by Boris Johnson, was “lightweight” – “that’s why he was appointed.”

Amusing because Case himself also pops up to spread the blame: “The vision of a nation released from the shackles of Brussels bureaucracy rapidly became a reality of muddled thinking, fruitless negotiations, Parliamentary quagmire and administrative confusion.”

The veteran anti-EU campaigner and former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell concludes glumly that “Vote Leave might have gained us self-government. We have yet to govern ourselves well.” Six prime ministers since 2016 and a seventh on the way make one wonder whether post-Brexit Britain is governable at all.

Disappointment, though, was always part of the package. The nature of Brexit was that it was doomed to become an instant lost cause – a mirage that dissipated as soon as it was approached. Victory was snatched away and, as Carswell puts it, “we still have the European disease”. Gisela Stuart, the ex-Labour MP who was prominent in the leave campaign, believes Britain is “still overshadowed by the ghosts of fifty years of EU membership”. Paul Stephenson, communications director of Vote Leave, describes its triumph now as “bittersweet”: “We wrestled victory out of the jaws of defeat, but then promptly allowed it to be snatched back off us again.”

Nowhere among the Brexiters is there any real reckoning with their own failures. Burns refers to the intractable issue of the Irish border as “the problems the Irish had created”, apparently unaware that Northern Ireland voted to remain and the Irish government very obviously did not want Brexit to happen.

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Patrick Minford, the economist who promised a golden age, writes (in an essay co-authored with Zheyi Zhu) that while “in the short run Brexit is bound to cause disruption”, its whole point is “to improve long-run performance”. We might adapt John Maynard Keynes and wonder whether in this long run all the leave voters will be dead before they see these economic benefits. The economists Paul Johnson and Robert Johnson argue here that, in fact, “it seems unlikely that the long term hit to national income will be less than 4 per cent, and it might well be more”.

Yet there’s no great evidence in this book that remainers are better at facing the identity crisis that lay behind Brexit. In her essay, Susan Greenfield acknowledges that “the all-important question of whether to leave or remain in the EU was somehow tied in with our identity”. But (reasonably enough for a neuroscientist) she goes on to think about identity only at a cognitive level. This is fascinating in itself but it serves largely to draw attention to the absence of any real attempt to define that “somehow” in concrete political and social terms.

For that, one must turn elsewhere – for example, to the rolling Future of England surveys conducted by the political scientists Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones. The most recent one finds that supporters of Farage rank “being English” above “being a parent” as a marker of who they think they are.

Those for whom being English is the essence of their identity were not happy in 2016 and they are no happier now. Henderson and Wyn Jones find them “deeply conscious of what they clearly regard as a jarring contrast between past glories and a present brought-low; an England whose eponymous national group seems to feel besieged both from within and without; an England that has secured major changes (not least, Brexit) in order to assuage its concerns, yet remains deeply dissatisfied with the results”.

Brexit was a dishonest and self-harming response to the English question. But the great and the good seem loth even to hear it, let alone try to provide a better answer.

Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking anthology My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies was first published in the US in 1973, though Gillian Anderson only read it for the first time when she took on the role of sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education. “Their unfiltered and painful honesty shook me,” she says of Friday’s letters and interviews in the introduction to Want, a new collection billed as the 21st-century update. Considering the issues raised by Friday’s book – what women want, and how that relates to the gender roles imposed on us – led Anderson to question how much might have changed in the intervening half-century, and to issue an appeal for answers.

Where Friday put an anonymous advertisement in a newspaper, the Dear Gillian project’s online portal had the potential to reach a global audience, and the responses amounted to nearly 1,000 pages. Anderson’s role has been to curate these into a more manageable selection, organised thematically: “Kink”, “Strangers” and “Power and Submission” are among the more obvious headings. Sceptical readers might be asking themselves what qualifies Anderson to edit a volume on this subject, beyond having played a sex therapist, but she is quick to offer a disclaimer. “I am not an expert and have no professional qualifications in this area,” she writes. “I am an actor by trade, and will therefore not be analysing these letters, or offering explanations on womanhood or sex in general.” What she does provide is a brief overview at the beginning of each section, occasionally including a personal anecdote that stops short of revealing anything truly intimate. But she has also hidden her own anonymous fantasy somewhere in the pages as a tease to the reader. ‘Would it match people’s assumptions about me?” she wonders.

The determinedly curious could attempt to narrow it down, because each contribution identifies its author by their (self-defined) nationality, ethnicity, religion, salary bracket, sexual identity, relationship status and number of children. The editorial choice to include earning power as a marker rather than age strikes me as a baffling one; not knowing how much life experience a writer brought to her story felt like an omission, while income seemed to have little relevance.

The letters included here represent, as promised, a colourful range of scenarios, confirming that increased representation and openness about female desire across the media in recent decades, together with greater acceptance (in some cultures) of more unconventional sexual arrangements, have resulted for many women in a more confident articulation of what they want (hence the title, though I feel they missed a trick in not calling it The XXX Files). More surprising, perhaps, is how many taboos from Friday’s time persist, and how much some women – even in supposedly liberal cultures – still experience crushing shame around their sexual feelings.

Elegant prose is not the main point here, so there is little mileage in critiquing Want for its literary qualities. Some of the pieces are fluently written, others are laden with cliche, and a depressing number betray the influence – both in style and content – of Fifty Shades of Grey. Power dynamics play a significant part in many of the fantasies, and there’s a palpable nervousness on Anderson’s part – and on some of the contributors’ – around the fact that women often fantasise about encounters involving violence, coercion, captivity and other degradations that would be horrifying in reality. Anderson is careful to clarify that the significant factor here is agency, and that the point of fantasy is that we are always in control; even so, there are one or two contributions that may make some readers uncomfortable, particularly where the writer mentions their own history of childhood abuse.

Almost more engaging than the rich inventiveness of women’s imaginative couplings (or more) is the glimpse many writers offer of their emotional lives. Some contributions are shot through with painful longing (women in loveless marriages; widows dealing with grief; queer women afraid to come out), and several explicitly say that they have never been able to express these feelings until now. Others are funny and exuberant, a celebration of pleasure. Overall, Want is an intriguing cabinet of curiosities showcasing the sheer glorious variety of female desire; at a time when women’s freedom of expression and agency is under threat in so many places, any platform that allows us to speak up about an aspect of our lives that is still frequently veiled in shame is to be applauded.