New Books in British Studies

After World War II, a new kind of playground emerged in Northern Europe and North America. Rather than slides, swings, and roundabouts, these new playgrounds encouraged children to build shacks and invent their own entertainment. Playgrounds: The Experimental Years (Reaktion, 2024) tells the story of how waste grounds and bombsites were transformed into hives of activity by children and progressive educators. It shows how a belief in the imaginative capacity of children shaped a new kind of playground and how designers reimagined what playgrounds could be. Ben Highmore tells a compelling story about pioneers, designers, and charities--and above all--about the value of play. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Ninety years after the discovery of human influenza virus, Modern Flu: British Medical Science and the Viralisation of Influenza, 1890—1950 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Michael Bresalier traces the history of this breakthrough and its implications for understanding and controlling influenza ever since. Examining how influenza came to be defined as a viral disease in the first half of the twentieth century, it argues that influenza’s viral identity did not suddenly appear with the discovery of the first human influenza virus in 1933. Instead, it was rooted in the development of medical virus research and virological ways of knowing that grew out of a half-century of changes and innovations in medical science that were shaped through two influenza pandemics, two world wars, and by state-sponsored programs to scientifically modernise British medicine. A series of transformations, in which virological ideas and practices were aligned with and incorporated into medicine and public health, underpinned the viralisation of influenza in the 1930s and 1940s. Collaboration, conflict and exchange between researchers, medical professionals and governmental bodies lay at the heart of this process.This book is a history of how virus researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists, medical scientific and public health bodies, and institutions, and philanthropies in Britain, the USA and beyond, forged a new medical consensus on the identity and nature of influenza. Shedding new light on the modern history of influenza, this book is a timely account of how ways of knowing and controlling this intractable epidemic disease became viral.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

John Eglin talks with Jana Byars about The Gambling Century: Commercial Gaming in Britain from Restoration to Regency (Oxford UP, 2023). Gambling captures as nothing else the drama of the "long eighteenth century" between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. Likewise, play for money was prominent in the public imagination as money itself, deployed through an ever expanding and ever more sophisticated range of mechanisms, increasingly invaded public awareness, as when prospective spouses in period fiction were rated in terms of annual income as if they were municipal bonds. Similarly, the archetypal figure of the gambler captured the imagination of the public in fiction, media, and politics. At the same time, new interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - encouraged and bankrolled by those in power - fostered a new and unprecedented appreciation for mathematical probability and its applications, opening the possibility that games of chance might be pursued as a profitable commercial venture. The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it. Using extensive archival material as well as printed sources, it follows its subjects from the Court to the coffeehouse, to private clubs and "at homes" in townhouses, all of which prefigure that quintessentially modern gambling space, the casino. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How do ordinary people write the stories of their lives? In A Hundred English Working-Class Lives, 1900-1945 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024), Rebecca Ball, a lecturer in history at Manchester Metropolitan University, presents the microhistory of a series of working-class autobiographies. Ranging from childhood experiences, through education, work, marriage and death, the book draws on the hundred voices to paint a rich and evocative picture of working-class life. These lives are lived against the backdrop of huge global events, not least of which are two world wars. Yet what comes through is the sense of continuity of everyday life even in the face of such huge social change. Offering theoretical reflection for historians as well as being accessible to general readers, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding life in the first half of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Welcome to Sotheran’s, one of the oldest bookshops in the world, with its weird and wonderful clientele, suspicious cupboards, unlabeled keys, poisoned books, and some things that aren’t even books, presided over by one deeply eccentric apprentice.Today’s book is: Once Upon A Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller (Norton, 2024), by Oliver Darkshire, a memoir which recounts how some years ago he stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd (est. 1761) to apply for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, Oliver was soon unteetering stacks of first editions and placating the store’s resident ghost (the late Mr. Sotheran, hit by a tram). A novice in this ancient and potentially haunted establishment, Oliver describes Sotheran’s brushes with history (Dickens, the Titanic), its joyous disorganization, and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old-fashioned staff. As Oliver gains confidence and experience, he explores the strange space that books occupy in our lives—where old books often have strong sentimental value, but rarely a commercial one. Once Upon a Tome is the colorful story of life in one of the world’s oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling, where to be uncommon or strange is the best possible compliment.Our guest is: Oliver Darkshire, who is the author of Once Upon a Tome, his memoir about being an antiquarian bookseller at Henry Sotheran Ltd. He lives in Manchester, England, with his husband and his neglectfully curated collection of books.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.Listeners may enjoy this playlist: In the Garden Behind the Moon Before and After the Book Deal Make Your Art No Matter What Stitching Freedom The Translators Daughter Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton UP, 2024), Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read.Mukhopadhyay's account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier's manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women's literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Fear was the unacknowledged spectre haunting the streets of London during the Second World War; fear not only of death from the German bombers circling above, but of violence at the hands of fellow Londoners in the streets below. Mass displacement, the anonymity of shelters, and the bomb-scarred landscape offered unprecedented opportunities for violent crime.In this absorbing, sometimes shocking account, titled Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Amy Helen Bell uncovers the hidden stories of murder and violence that were rife in wartime London. Dr. Bell moves through the city, examining the crimes in their various locations, from domestic violence in the home to robberies in the blacked-out streets and fights in pubs and clubs. She reveals the experiences of women, children, and the elderly, and focuses on the lives of the victims, as well as their deaths.This groundbreaking study transforms our understanding of the ways in which war made people vulnerable—not just to the enemy, but to each other.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How did Jurgen Klopp change Liverpool? In Transformer: Klopp, the Revolution of a Club and Culture (Canongate, 2024), Neil Atkinson, host of The Anfield Wrap tells the story of Klopp’s time at the football club and in the city. The book ranges widely, from socio-cultural history, through personal memoir, to tactical analysis and contemplations on the changing styles and patterns of football. Structured around 19 key games, the book also features reflections on the need for a transformation in English (as well as European and global) football governance, alongside politics and society more generally. Funny, moving, and deeply poignant, the book will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand football, culture and society in past decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Five hundred years ago, Thomas Wolsey endowed in Oxford a foundation he called Cardinal's College. Henry VIII, the monarch who dismissed and ruined him, re-established it as Christ Church later in his reign as an institution rich, spacious and imposing beyond any other.It would help young men of Tudor England and beyond to study history, improve their minds, enlarge imaginations and broaden experience for the benefit of the realm - under the tutelage, of course, of some remarkable dons.Generations of students had their intellects and world perspectives shaped by Oxford. It was believed that the study of history - touching the ancient world at one end and modern politics at the other - interlaced with geography, economics, political science, law and modern languages, would demonstrate the reasons for the success or failure of states. The student would be taught - in Sir Isaiah Berlin's memorable phrase - to 'spot the bunk!'In History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft (William Collins, 2024), acclaimed historian Richard Davenport- Hines examines the intimate connections between British politics, statecraft and the Oxford University history course. He explores the temperaments, ideas, imagination, prejudices, intentions and influence of a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history at Christ Church: Frederick York Powell, Arthur Hassall, Keith Feiling, J. C. Masterman, Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Robert Blake; by turns an unruly Victorian radical, a staunch legitimist of the Protestant settlement, a Tory, a Whig, a Keynesian, a socialist, a rationalist who enjoyed mischief and a student of realpolitik.These dons, with their challenging and sometimes contradictory opinions, explored with their pupils the wielding of power, the art of persuasion and the exercise of civil and political responsibility. Intelligent, strenuous and aware of the treachery and uncontrollability of things in the world, they studied the crimes, follies, misfortunes, incapacity, muddle and disloyalty of humankind in every generation. History in the House offers an unforgettable portrait of these men, their enduring influence and the significance of their arguments to public life today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities who have to find ways to manage death, to support the bereaved and to dispose of bodies amidst the confusion of conflict. It matters to the state, which has to find ways of coping with mass death that convey a sense of gratitude and respect for the sacrifice of both the victims of war, and those that mourn in their wake.Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (Manchester University Press, 2020) by Dr. Lucy Noakes is a social and cultural history of Britain in the Second World War places death at the heart of our understanding of the British experience of conflict. Drawing on a range of material, Dying for the Nation demonstrates just how much death matters in wartime and examines the experience, management and memory of death.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies