Search
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/carre.jpg?itok=_eDcFMJa)
In an age where the welfare state, the social jewel in Britain's post-war crown, seems to be at breaking point, Jacques Carré's latest book, La prison des pauvres : l'expérience des workhouses en Angleterre (The Pauper's Prison: The Experience of Workhouses in England), is a timely reminder that public welfare in Britain has a long and complicated history.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/stourton.jpg?itok=t40xlMmt)
The BBC began broadcasting television programmes from its own studios in 1932 and launched a regular TV service in 1936, only to shut it down when, three years later, Great Britain declared war on Germany. Edward Stourton’s Auntie’s War: The BBC during the Second World War is therefore about radio, and in particular the tug of war within the corporation between 1939 and 1945.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/makepeace.jpg?itok=XXX2btHT)
The fate of prisoners of war (POWs) is now established within the mainstream of historical enquiry. As well as a growing literature on the subject, modules dedicated to studying the history of POWs are now a common feature on university history courses. The two books under review focus on British servicemen captured during the Second World War.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Edgerton.jpg?itok=eHyN_Ubn)
For almost 30 years David Edgerton has produced a series of well-researched and ground-breaking revisionist accounts of this country's recent past, which have exposed the inadequacies and weaknesses of 'declinism' as an explanation of Britain's changing domestic and international experience since 1900.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/Webster.jpg?itok=7WEIK6f5)
There are few historical events with a cultural legacy as enduring as that connected to the Second World War. The conflict occupies an important place within many personal, as well as national, narratives. Those interested in its history and heritage are confronted by an enormous range of writing, on a wide variety of themes.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/bailkin.jpg?itok=KWFOhRQP)
With her latest book, Jordanna Bailkin makes a singularly impressive contribution to 20th-century British history. Her focus is on the various sites that were built or, more commonly, re-purposed to hold refugees who reached Britain at various stages in the 20th century.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/auerbach180.jpg?itok=ooTIJu6g)
‘This book’, writes Jeffrey A. Auerbach in his Introduction to Imperial Boredom, ‘is very much about how people felt’ [his italics]. As such, it takes its place in a growing body of scholarship that explores through individual lives the mind-set that under-pinned the empire project, both individually and on a collective level.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/boom.jpg?itok=YiTqGIqi)
The planning of cities from the 1940s to the 1960s is one of the major strands of British (and indeed, international) post-war social history.
![](https://reviews.history.ac.uk/sites/reviews/files/styles/thumbnail/public/images/thatcher_cover.jpg?itok=awLs8swn)
In 1979 Pete Wrong of the art collective and Punk band Crass was being interviewed by New Society about his graffiti operation on the London Underground: ‘We don’t just rip the posters down or spray them. We use stencils, neatly, to qualify them.