Search results

In March 1954 Peter Wildeblood, a London journalist, was one of five men charged with homosexual acts in the notorious Montagu Case, as it came to be known. Wildeblood was sentenced to eighteen months for homosexual offences, along with Lord Montagu and Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. The other two men were set free after turning Queen's Evidence. In this book, first published in 1955, Peter Wildeblood tells the story of his childhood and schooldays, his war service and university days, his life as...

This is the first study of the British Women's Liberation Movement's relationship with class politics. It explores the meaning of class to women's liberationists' identities and activism, both nationally and regionally, using a previously neglected feminist cluster in North East England as a case study. Stevenson demonstrates that British feminism was shaped fundamentally by its relationship to, synthesis with, and rejection of class politics. Through these processes, feminists recognised how p...

In December 1962, nationalists in Brunei, the hugely wealthy small kingdom on the North Coast of Borneo, formed the Army of North Kalimantan (TNKU) and, demanding greater democracy, engineered a rebellion against the Sultan and seized a large number of hostages. Perceived to be an attempt by communists to destabilise the Sultanate and seize power, within twelve hours of its outbreak, British forces were despatched by ship and aircraft from Singapore to restore order, the first unit to arrive be...

Part of the new Ladybird Expert series, The Bomber War is an accessible, insightful and authoritative introduction to the airborne Allied fight against Nazi Germany.- How did aeroplane technology change the theatre of war?- How did the Blitz affect Britain's ability to fight?- How did the Allies finally triumph?DISCOVER how the complex impact of bomber technology shaped the outcome of World War II. From the Blitz to the Battle of the Ruhr, the Bomber War transformed the state of warfare in the t...

After World War I, the U.S. Navy's brief alliance with the British Royal Navy gave way to disagreements over disarmament, fleet size, interpretations of freedom of the seas, and general economic competition. This go-it-alone approach lasted until the next world war, when the U.S. Navy found itself fighting alongside the British, Canadian, Australian, and other Allied navies until the surrender of Germany and Japan. In The U.S. Navy and Its Cold War Alliances, 1945-1953, Corbin Williamson explore...

World War One had a devastating, cataclysmic impact on the world and the British people. As its reverberations were so long-lasting and significant, it is easy to assume that the social consequences were as profound. In this highly readable and moving survey of life back at home during the First World War, Gerard DeGroot challenges this assumption, finding pre-war social structures were surprisingly resilient. Despite economic and technological changes, the British peoplemanaged to cling onto th...

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s, between the England of "Pomp and Circumstance", the first Post-Impressionist show and "Man and Superman" and the England of "The Waste Land", "Facade" and "The Green Hat", World War I opens like a gap in history, separating one world of beliefs and values from another, and changing not only the map of Europe, but the ways in which men and women imagined reality itself. Because of the war, England after the war was a different place: the arts wer...

*A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year 2021*'Preposterously entertaining' Observer'Brilliant' Daily Telegraph'Rollicking' Sunday TimesFrom the bestselling author of The Long Weekend: a wild, sad and sometimes hilarious tour of the English country house after the Second World War, when Swinging London collided with aristocratic values.As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising ta...

No self-respecting Victorian lady would enter a British pub, a florid drinking den where working men guzzled pints of beer. When brewers, inspired by the Progressive belief that the physical environment influenced moral behavior, turned to the problem of working-class drinking during the interwar years, they set to work reinventing the pub itself. Acting on a genuine belief in the possibility of social betterment, reformers found ready allies among not only government officials but religious le...

'An exceptional account.' Prospect'Enlightening.' SpectatorFor the first time in millennia we live without formal empires. But that doesn't mean we don't feel their presence rumbling through history. The Great Imperial Hangover examines how the world's imperial legacies are still shaping the thorniest issues we face today. From Russia's incursions in the Ukraine to Brexit; from Trump's 'America-first' policy to China's forays into Africa; from Modi's India to the hotbed of the Middle East, Puri...

Born into the gap between the eras of austerity and boom, David grew up in Merseyside amid an inexorable tide of progress, developing a fascination with the past. With a vivid eye for detail and boundless childhood curiosity for everything from steam trains to ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, his account documents the uneasy relationship between worlds old and new. Featuring unique photographs and authoritative observations on architecture, social and local history based on forty years' work in museums...

No Free Speech for Fascists explores the choice of anti-fascist protesters to demand that the opportunities for fascists to speak in public places are rescinded, as a question of history, law, and politics. It explains how the demand to no platform fascists emerged in 1970s Britain, as a limited exception to a left-wing tradition of support for free speech. The book shows how no platform was intended to be applied narrowly, only to a right-wing politics that threatened everyone else. It contras...

Winner of the 2022 British Association of Irish Studies (BAIS) Book Prize In the years following the Irish Famine (1845–52), London became one of the cities of Ireland. The number of Irish in London swelled to over 100,000 and from this mass migration emerged a distinctive and vibrant culture based on a shared sense of history, identity and experience. In this book, Richard Kirkland brings together elements in Irish London’s culture and history that had previously only been understood separatel...

The British Jesus focuses on the Jesus of the religious culture dominant in Britain from the 1850s through the 1950s, the popular Christian culture shared by not only church, kirk, and chapel goers, but also the growing numbers of Britons who rarely or only episodically entered a house of worship. An essay in intellectual as well as cultural history, this book illumines the interplay between and among British New Testament scholarship, institutional Christianity, and the wider Protestant cultur...

Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck is a study not only of the individual but also of how the British Army, Indian Army and the Empire were transformed during his long military career. Auchinleck was commissioned into the Indian Army from 1904 and served with distinction against the Turks in Egypt and the Mesopotamian campaign, earning a DSO. Between the wars he was involved in the pacification of the Northwest Frontier (now Pakistan). In the Second World War he briefly led a division in the ill-fa...

The history of Britain's complex relationship with Europe, untangled "The best short introduction to both the political realignment that produced the 2016 Referendum result and the immense fallout since."-CapX, "Books of the Year" (2020) "[A] cool-headed, fair, and judicious analysis of Britain and the EU at a decisive period in history"- Thomas Gallagher, Brexit-Watch.org Is Britain a part of Europe? The British have been ambivalent on this question since the Second World War, when the West...