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Gavin Schaffer’s ambitious and important new book explores how British television dealt with and shaped multiracialism between 1960 and 1980. He sees television’s relationship to multiracialism, not primarily as a mirror to society, but rather as a ‘generator of social meaning’ and a ‘clear “site of struggle”’ (p. 2).
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In the latest of our occasional Reviews in History podcast series, Daniel Snowman talks to Claire Tomalin about her work as a historical biographer.
Claire Tomalin (born Claire Delavenay on 20 June 1933) is an English author and journalist, known for her biographies on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
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The dissemination of cultural improvement was written into the ethos of the BBC under John Reith, the first director-general from 1927. Until 1945 the BBC broadcast a single national service and therefore constructed programming that attempted to offer a culturally unified ‘voice of the nation’.
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The literature of the British home front differs distinctly in both quantity and nature between the two wars themselves.
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Essay collections are always a mixed bag, and this one is more muddled than most. The warning signs are clear. The volume is part of a series ominously titled ‘Austrian Studies in English’. Six of the 15 essays were papers presented at a 2010 conference of the same name at the University of Vienna.
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Tucked away in museums displaying and storing collections of dress and textiles there is often a subsidiary but significant collection of printed ephemera. This might encompass bills, trade cards, paper carrier bags, fashion plates and dressmaking patterns.
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Terence Brown’s history of the Irish Times is one of a number of similar texts published recently which indicates an upsurge of interest in the Irish media landscape – Kevin Rafter’s Irish Journalism Before Independence (1), Ann Andrews’ Newspapers and Newsmakers (2) and Mark O’Brien and Felix Larkin’s edited collect
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Rather like the ever-rising middle classes, in every decade of modern history British men appear to be in the midst of becoming better fathers.
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With the SNP decimation of all other parties in Scotland, in the 2015 General Election, Irene Morra’s engaging study of popular music and Britishness is perhaps more poignant than she might have originally anticipated!
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Popular newspapers in Britain are commonly criticised for providing unsophisticated, distasteful and intrusive journalism, driven by an aggressive pursuit of exclusives and an unscrupulous desire for profit.