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The articulation of a national network of elementary schools in England and Wales after 1870 and legislation to compel attendance at these schools from 1880 created marvellous opportunities for publishers. School authorities were major purchasers and the children in their schools a captive audience.
This collection of essays arises from a conference hosted by the Centre for Metropolitan History at the Institute of Historical Research on 13 April 2000 entitled ‘Revisiting the Livery Companies’.
Pornography used to be regarded as ephemeral, trivial and unimportant. Insofar as it had a history, it was as one aspect of the long battle for, and ultimate triumph of, free speech. Histories of literary censorship and legal obscenity by writers like H.
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!
John Monro was not, I suspect, an interesting man.
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.
For a long time after 1945, as Basil Fawlty famously discovered, it was almost impossible to avoid mentioning the war.
In Stephen Reynolds's A Poor Man's House, first published in 1908, he gives a loving description of the 'baked dinner' that 'Mam Widger' would cook, when funds permitted, for the Sidmouth fishing family with whom he lived:
This is the recipe for baked dinner:
Despite a certain academic heaviness, with no fewer than fifty-seven pages of notes, bibliography and index, and despite an occasionally disagreeable academic vocabulary, of which more anon, this book has a pleasantly simple knock-down argument, that Christianity in Britain enjoyed a long nineteenth century of prosperity, between 1800 and 1960, and only began to go into terminal decline in the
Figures in the Landscape brings together fifteen pieces of research by Margaret Spufford stretching across her distinguished career from 1962 to the present day.(1) As such, it reflects her broad range of interests, in the use of primary sources - particularly probate and taxation documents; the history of village communities; and popular consumption, literacy