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For a long time after 1945, as Basil Fawlty famously discovered, it was almost impossible to avoid mentioning the war.
This is an ambitious and in many respects singularly brave book which adds a further dimension to the growing understanding of middle-class life that has prompted the research of increasing numbers of historians in the last decade or so.
This year is a momentous one for students of early modern Britain. Elizabeth I’s death, four hundred years ago, ended the Tudor dynasty and brought the Stuart kings of Scotland to the English throne. The dynastic changeover inaugurated a new phase of the history of this island.
John Monro was not, I suspect, an interesting man.
Philip Salmon took on an ambitious project when he began his study of parliamentary reform and the electoral system. He looked at how the Reform Act of 1832 affected 'the business of obtaining the vote' (p.
Niall Ferguson is a glutton for exposure. From January to mid-February 2003 six one-hour television programmes, four lectures to substantial audiences in the University of London’s Senate House, and a large glossy book have been devoted to his theme of ‘empire’ or, as he also puts it, ‘how Britain made the modern world’.
Ronald Hutton begins his account of the Restoration, The Restoration: a Political and Religious History of England and Wales (Clarendon; Oxford, 1985) by contrasting the attention historians had paid to the English Civil War with the relatively few monographs devoted to the subsequent phase of history: in his words, 'the history of the English Revolution now reads like a marvellous sto
At first sight the idea of another scrutiny of the official mind hardly seems likely to add much to the debate on the end of empire.
Writing in the weekly journal the New Statesman on 17 March 2003, the columnist Cristina Odone praised British troops in the Gulf for enduring the privations of active service without complaint. Quoting Henry Newbolt’s invocation of British chivalry in Vitai Lampada, in which British soldiers remember their schoolboy selves and resolve to 'Play up! Play up!
In this book Georgios Varouxakis analyses the Victorian perceptions and representations of France and the French by intellectuals or, more precisely, ‘public moralists’. John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and Walter Bagehot provide the major textual sources, supplemented by a handful of lesser-known authors.