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In what was presumably a formative period for Stefan Collini (born in 1947) in the late 1960s, Perry Anderson published a powerful diatribe against English letters for its imperviousness to the great sweep of 20th-century social thought from Marx through Weber, Durkheim and Pareto onwards.(1) Historians were indentured to facts and sources and an impossible ideal of ac
Lesley Milne’s Laughter and War: Humorous-Satirical Magazines in Britain, France, Germany and Russia 1914–1918, offers a well written overview of the humour of four nations during the Great War, and in turn, four satirical magazines that provoked laughter in these combatant countries.
Good reference books on the history of alcohol remain few and far between, despite increased interest in the area in the last 20 years.
The age of lesbian and gay, in which those were the dominant terms for homoeroticism and other things that seemed (sometimes arbitrarily) to be related to it, appears to be over.
Surveying the latter half of the 20th century in Britain, Professor James Hinton highlights the popular tendency to consider this period in terms of its characteristic decades. There is ‘the boring 1950s, the exciting 1960s, the crisis-ridden 1970s, [and] Mrs. Thatcher’s 1980s’ (p. 23).
Sonya Rose’s initial interest in national identity was sparked by the patriotic fervor that burst forth following the declaration of the first Iraq War (1990–1). ‘I wondered at how easily patriotic sentiment and the sense of belonging to a nation under threat – even if that threat was so far away – could be aroused’ (p. 285).
On entering Shakespeare in Ten Acts, the British Library’s contribution to the world-wide celebrations commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, visitors are greeted by perhaps the most recognizable Shakespearean artefact: a copy of the 1623 First Folio.
In a recent blog post for the Women’s History Association of Ireland, Caitriona Clear reflected on how Irish women’s history had now reached a critical mass ‘whereby it does not need to be identified with any one historian or any group of historians’.
The 1950 feature film Dance Hall is one of Ealing Studios lesser-known releases. Crafted around the lives of four working-class women – played by Natasha Perry, Petula Clark, Jane Hylton and Diana Dors – the narrative shifts between the spaces of factory work, domestic life and commercial leisure. The most significance location is, however, the Chiswick Palais de Danse.
For much of the last century the literature on the history of documentary film was small and virtually every book-length contribution intimately familiar to its committed but specialist readership.