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When I was an undergraduate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the early 1980s, the School had a motto: knowledge is power. Students of a radical inclination would denounce this explicit evocation of the School's imperial origins, and evidently the criticism took its toll.
On the opening page of her new book Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages, Diana Webb identifies its driving interests: first, 'in what medieval people regarded as reason or justification for retreating, permanently or temporarily, from the wider society, and secondly in their awareness of their dwelling spaces'.
This book is the result of a bold and innovative research project funded between 1999 and 2002 by the then Arts and Humanities Research Board, with further funds provided subsequently by a number of scholarly institutions. The preface further acknowledges the support of a glittering array of scholars, not least Geoffrey Parker who read through the entire draft.
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive was launched in late 2008. The site comprises a substantially revamped version of what was previously the Wilfred Owen archive and includes Oxford University’s virtual seminars for teaching literature online series.
On 8 February 2008, the Polish minister of culture announced that his government would not support the establishment of a centre in Berlin commemorating the expulsion of Germans and other ethnic minorities in the 20th century.
In Our Friend ‘The Enemy’ Thomas Weber attacks both the Sonderweg-interpretation of the German Kaiserreich and theories of British exceptionalism before 1914.
Introduction: trauma, modernity, and the First World War
Historians of nursing in Britain have long been fighting for a place in the history of medicine. For example, of the 718 pages of text in Roy Porter’s best-selling The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, only five are concerned with nursing, and these, inevitably, with Florence Nightingale and 19th-century hospital reform.
The First World War was a terrible experience that most soldiers were shocked by once they became active participants. How were soldiers’ able to cope with the grim realities of this war? How were they able to keep going in spite of losing close friends and comrades in one battle after another?
The title of this volume is something of a misnomer or, at least, there is a crucial word missing from it.