HUGO YOUNG, an author, alighted on Hobbesian metaphors to describe Britain's negotiations, in the early 1970s, to join the then European Economic Community. But if accession was "nasty", "occasionally brutish" and "indisputably long", leaving the club may prove harder still. Last week Theresa May, Britain's prime minister, praised the European Union effusively even as she triggered the process to leave it, beginning two years of withdrawal negotiations. But Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, captured the mood better, predicting "difficult, complex and sometimes even confrontational" talks.
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