New Books in British Studies

Jonathan Sandler’s The English GI: World War II Graphic Memoir of a Yorkshire Schoolboy’s Adventures in the United States and Europe, is an adaptation of his grandfather’s 1994 war memoir. His grandfather, Bernard Sandler, was a British citizen of Latvian Jewish descent who served in the American Army. The book is illustrated by Brian Bicknell. The English GI sheds light into the experience of ave...

James VI and I has long endured a mixed reputation. To many, he is the homosexual King, the inveterate witch-roaster, the smelly sovereign who never washed, the colourless man behind the authorised Bible bearing his name, the drooling fool whose speech could barely be understood. For too long, he has paled in comparison to his more celebrated – and analysed – Tudor and Stuart forebears. But who wa...

Malaita is one of the major islands in the Solomons Archipelago and has the largest population in the Solomon Islands nation. Its people have an undeserved reputation for conservatism and aggression. Clive Moore's book Making Mala: Malaita in Solomon Islands, 1870s–1930s (Australia National UP, 2017) argues that in essence Malaitans are no different from other Solomon Islanders, and that their dom...

It’s been over three years since the UK withdrew from the EU and no one – not even the most ardent Brexiter – thinks it has gone well so far. Defending the cause after yet another summertime setback, the best Matthew Lesh from the Institute of Economic Affairs could offer was: “Brexit simply means that British representatives can make … choices, not that they must point in any particular direction...

Dr. Richard Waugaman is an emeritus supervising and training analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. He is also a well-respected author. With regard to his career he has said, “I have practiced clinical psychoanalysis for over 40 years. Initially, my publications were mostly on psychoanalysis.” In 2002, he made a discovery when he learned that the traditional theory about wh...

Is the raw material of literature the paper, ink, vellum, paphyrus, and increasingly electronic data that it is inscribed on? Or is the stuff of literature the storehouse of tropes, techniques, and plots that authors draw from? And what kind of labor is the process of transforming that matter into literature? Earlier this year, Taylor Cowdery published an academic study on just this subject. The t...

In 1939, a number of German Jewish refugee children, brought over on the Kindertransport, found themselves in Abergele, North Wales. Their temporary new home? Gwrych Castle, where a Hachshara was being set up: a residential 'training centre' aimed at preparing the Jewish children for life on a kibbutz in Israel, where they hoped to be reunited with their families. In Escape to Gwrych Castle: A Jew...

During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in...

The British National Health Service - free for all - used to be the envy of the world. But today the NHS is malfunctioning. More and more people are resorting to private care – is not unusual now for Brits to travel to Turkey or Lithuania to get hip replacements and the like – so should Britain now give up on the NHS and move to a European model of healthcare… Dr Gavin Francis has just written a b...

The first biography of Henry VIII’s court fool William Somer, a legendary entertainer and one of the most intriguing figures of the Tudor age In some portraits of Henry VIII there appears another, striking figure—a gaunt and morose-looking man with a shaved head and, in one case, a monkey on his shoulder. This is William or "Will" Somer, the king’s fool, a celebrated wit who reportedly could raise...

Today’s guest is Aaron Kunin, Professor of English at Pomona College. We will discuss two books Aaron published in 2019: the first is Character as Form (Bloomsbury), a re-examination of the early modern understanding of “character” as stereotype, generalization, and convention. In Character as Form, Aaron braids together close readings of furniture in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a reflectio...

Across Europe, from the dawn of print until the early twentieth century, the news of crime and criminals' public executions was printed in song form on cheap broadsides and pamphlets to be sold in streets and marketplaces by ballad-singers. Singing the News of Death: Execution Ballads in Europe 1500-1900 (Oxford UP, 2022) looks at how and why song was employed across Europe for centuries as a vehi...

Today I talked to Jeremy Black about his new book Why the Industrial Revolution Happened in Britain (Amberley Publishing, 2023). Britain's key importance in world history was a product of its constitution and its empire, but both, in turn, were sustained and supported by Britain's role in achieving the first Industrial Revolution. In part this was a matter of coal and steam but far more was involv...

A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data.  Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how s...

For much of the past three months, the northeastern Indian state of Manipur—nestled right up against the border with Myanmar—has been the site of a conflict between two groups: the majority Meiteis and the minority Kukis. The fighting–with scenes of brutal violence, looting of police stations, and burnt places of worship–even sparked a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Narendra Modi....

In The Frontier in British India: Space, Science, and Power in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge UP, 2021), Thomas Simpson provides an innovative account of how distinctive forms of colonial power and knowledge developed at the territorial fringes of colonial India during the nineteenth century. Through critical interventions in a wide range of theoretical and historiographical fields, he speaks t...

Family history is one of the most widely practiced forms of public history around the globe, especially in settler migrant nations like Australia and Canada. It empowers millions of researchers, linking the past to the present in powerful ways, transforming individuals' understandings of themselves and the world. Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History (Bloom...

The most famous phrase in American history once looked quite different. "The preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness" was how Thomas Jefferson put it in the first draft of the Declaration, before the first ampersand was scratched out, along with "the preservation of." In a statement as pithy--and contested--as this, a small deletion matters. And indeed, that final, iconizing re...

Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (U Wales Press, 2022) demonstrates a little-studied crossover between the Gothic imagination and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. Unafraid to explore the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, Laura R. Kremmel argues, Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and chapbooks expanded the possibilities...

Conor Lucey's book House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life (Four Courts Press, 2022) explores the everyday character and functions of domestic spaces in Georgian Ireland. While the design and decoration of the country pile and the aristocratic town house enjoys a long and distinguished literature, to date there has been no sustained examination of how rooms were ha...

A rich and indulgent history, English Food: A Social History of England Told Through the Food on Its Tables (William Collins, 2022) by Dr. Diane Purkiss will change the way you view your food and understand your past. Dr. Purkiss uses the story of food as a revelatory device to chart changing views on class, gender, and tradition through the ages. Sprinkled throughout with glorious details of hist...

When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse. Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my ple...

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2016) explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this...

After his dramatic rise to power in the summer of 2019 amid the Brexit deadlock, Boris Johnson presided over the most turbulent period of British history in living memory. Beginning with the controversial prorogation of Parliament in August and the historic landslide election victory later that year, Johnson was barely through the door of No. 10 when Britain was engulfed by a series of crises that...

In Smollett's Britain (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), acclaimed British historian Jeremy Black examines the layers of craft and insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's works and offers a backstage tour of the meaning and context of Britain's most...