Search

As David Nash correctly observes in the opening sentence of his stimulating study of the history of blasphemy in modern Britain, 'In modern British society each successive generation complacently congratulates itself that blasphemy is a curious and even fascinating anachronism.' Yet each generation, including our own, is apt to discover that, far from

This is an important book which deserves wide circulation. It is perhaps the only satisfactory extended study yet produced of that important cultural figure Havelock Ellis and the impact of his writings. The parlous state of Ellis scholarship was recently demonstrated by Vernon Rosario's otherwise excellent edited volume Science and Homosexualities (1997).

A fascinating survey and analysis of the 'Fourth Estate'and its impact and involvement on nationalist politics in Ireland in the second half of the Victorian age.

Is it possible to write a popular book on the subject of money that is both readable and scholarly? The feat has been accomplished in other areas of history with books on people and battles, written by reputable academics, to be found on best seller lists. However, one of the few I know in financial history is J.K.

This is a timely and necessary book after nearly a quarter of a century during which a steady stream of specialist monographs and articles on Irish communities in individual British towns and cities has appeared.

Although by far the oldest and most numerous ethnic minority in Britain, the Irish have received relatively little attention within British social history or indeed the sociology of migration, race and ethnicity.

The study of life insurance as a cultural practice has been moving in from the margins of social historical enquiry for some time now. As early as 1979 Viviana Zelizer took an important step beyond the confines of institutional business history with her study of public debates about the moral implications of life-insurance practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

A scholarly history of the Great Exhibition these days is both a welcome and a brave undertaking. Welcome, because despite the fact that the event has been a commonplace of school history teaching and a recognisable landmark for historians of the nineteenth century, it has not been appreciated in a three-dimensional manner.

The age of the historian as public moralist is not quite past. To be sure, most of us today are content to write for each other on matters of no particular current concern and harbour little ambition to reach a lay audience, let alone convert it.

The nineteenth-century German political theorist, Heinrich von Treitschke, concluded that it was war 'which turns a people into a nation.' His opinion has been reiterated by scholars over the years, many of whom concur with Michael Howard's assertion that from 'the very beginning, the principle of nationalism was almost indissolubly linked, both in t