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A sure sign of the ageing process is when events that are part of your own memory start appearing in works of history. And so it is now the case with the 1980s; for one’s students, ‘Thatcher’ is a person of whom they have no firsthand knowledge, just a figure whom many of their lecturers and supervisors are prone to paint as the devil incarnate.
In 1966 the historical profession was deprived of a talented and original practitioner, when Dr Walter Love was killed in a traffic accident. Utah-born Love was drawn towards Irish history following his postgraduate research into Edmund Burke, and ultimately his interest centred on how the events of 1641 had become engrained into collective memory in Ireland.
This volume, a collection of essays written by academics based in North America, Britain and Europe, is a good example of how far leisure history has travelled since this historical sub-discipline first gathered momentum in the 1970s.
The question of the nature of allegiance in the English Civil Wars has been a perennial issue for at least three generations of professional academics.
Modernity Britain marks the third part of Kynaston’s Tales of a New Jerusalem series. The first volume – Austerity Britain 1945–51 – covered the immediate post-war years of the Attlee government, while its successor, Family Britain 1951–57, took the story up to the end of the Eden administration.
It is a rare thing for a reviewer to read a book which on its own terms, in its content and argument, leaves nothing open to serious criticism. Professor Diarmaid Ferriter’s Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s is one such book.
Matthew Hendley’s Organized Patriotism examines the ways in which three ‘patriotic and imperialist leagues’ coped with the impact of the First World War. Focusing on the ‘politically and socially acceptable’ National Service League, League of the Empire and Victoria League (p.
For some the 1980s is within living memory; others are familiar with it as a piece of history. Whatever your attachment to the decade that in many ways significantly shaped the Britain we live in today, this book serves to paint a great image of the contours of that bygone age.
Michael Fry is that unusual individual these days, an independent scholar and a regular (often controversial and amusing) newspaper columnist, who has also devoted himself to becoming a highly productive and successful historian of his adopted country.
It would be all too easy to cast aside Camilla Schofield’s book, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, with an assumption that there is little new to say on the subject.