What do you feel when you get a new passport? Sad and excited—and also, intrigued. My old passport was nearly as old as this age of terror. It is striking how the intervening years—a decade of paranoia about migration and data insecurity—have stamped, so to speak, the replacement that plopped through the letterbox this week.

The new British passport addresses anxieties about identity in more than just the proliferation of embedded microchips, shimmering holograms and intricate, subtly-coloured, photocopier-thwarting details. A British passport is now, as for some time, a carefully prescribed variation on a standard European paradigm.

The very document that asserts your status as a citizen of a sovereign nation is becoming ever more global—an object metaphor, you could say, for the postmodern disposition of international affairs. We have come far from the old, large-format, black leather passports Britons touted in the 1970s—yet such nostalgia is felt for these