Historians of both Britain and Ireland have too often adopted a blinkered approach in which their countries have been envisaged as somehow divorced from the continent in which they are geographically placed. If America and the Empire get an occasional mention, Europe as a whole has largely been ignored. Of course the British-Irish relationship had (and has) its peculiarities.

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From Britain to the United States, France to Australia, Western states are struggling with an identity crisis: how to cultivate a common cultural ‘core’, a social ‘bond’, which goes beyond the global economy and political liberalism. It is too early to predict whether Brexit is the last gasp of the old structure of national identity, or its revival.

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Actors, authors, artists, and musicians alike are taking stand to urge voters against Britain leaving the EU. Stars, including our own Helena Bonham Carter and Sir John Hurt and Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch, argue that taking such a step would hurt the creative industries in Britain. Over 250 celebrities signed the letter, published by the Telegraph, in it they wrote:

From the smallest gallery to the biggest blockbuster, many of us have worked on projects that would never have happened without EU funding or collaborating across borders. Britain is not just stronger in the EU, it is more imaginative and creative. Our global creative success would be severely weakened by walking away.

Many of those who signed are worried about where their industries would end up if Britain left the EU, calling it a “leap into the unknown.” They believe that, without the EU, Britain will lose it’s creative influence on the world. Britain has been center stage, creatively, for decades, centuries, even; people are afraid that making such a drastic decision as no longer being a part of the EU will hurt them beyond repair.

Not all actors are backing the ‘Remain’ campaign. Those like Michael Caine and the creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, have said they will be voting against it. Caine believes that the EUs rules on freedom of movement put a damper on young English talent. Fellowes said in an interview with Daily Mail:

It’s not just that I think they are important – because they are – but I think it’s the wrong direction. History has for hundreds of years been moving towards government that is answerable to the people and suddenly we have done an about-turn and we’ve gone back to the Austro-Hungarian empire. I don’t think that’s the right direction.

Thursday, June 23rd, will be a day full of politics as the referendum is held. Several television networks will be hosting debates, so we will see arguments from both sides before we receive the tally of votes and ultimately the fate of Britain.

See more on the subject here.

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Currently a UK-authorized bank, insurer or securities firm has the right to carry on business in another EEA state without further authorization. This passporting right allows UK firms to access European markets and over 2000 UK investment firms benefit from a passport under MiFID. UK firms will lose this right if it exits the EU without mutual recognition.

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As the new leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, wrestles with his own beliefs about nuclear weapons and those opposing beliefs of many members of the Shadow Cabinet, it is interesting to look back to the debates which took place in the Labour Government of Clement Attlee in the immediate post-war period.

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The First World War threw the imperial order into crisis. New states emerged, while German and Ottoman territories fell to the allies who wanted to keep their acquisitions. In the following three videos Susan Pedersen, author of The Guardians, discusses the emegence of the League of Nations and its role in imperial politics.

The post Did the League of Nations ultimately fail? appeared first on OUPblog.

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World War Two was the most devastating conflict in recorded human history. It was both global in extent and total in character. It has understandably left a long and dark shadow across the decades. Yet it is three generations since hostilities formally ended in 1945 and the conflict is now a lived memory for only a few. And this growing distance in time has allowed historians to think differently about how to describe it, how to explain its course, and what subjects to focus on when considering the wartime experience.

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This is only my second Kazuo Ishiguro book following on from Never Let Me Go. For me, coming off a novel about cloning, I had no expectations about where he would go next. Much has been made about this novel being a “departure” for Ishiguro but I would argue that he has gone back to something […]

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By December 1914 the Great War had been raging for nearly five months. If anyone had really believed that it would be ‘all over by Christmas’ then it was clear that they had been cruelly mistaken. Soldiers in the trenches had gained a grudging respect for their opposite numbers. After all, they had managed to fight each other to a standstill.

On Christmas Eve there was a severe frost. From the perspective of the freezing-cold trenches the idea of the season of peace and goodwill seemed surrealistic. Yet parcels and Christmas gifts began to arrive in the trenches and there was a strange atmosphere in the air. Private William Quinton was watching:

We could see what looked like very small coloured lights. What was this? Was it some prearranged signal and the forerunner of an attack? We were very suspicious, when some­thing even stranger happened. The Germans were actually singing! Not very loud, but there was no mistaking it. Suddenly, across the snow-clad No Man’s Land, a strong clear voice rang out, singing the opening lines of “Annie Laurie“. It was sung in perfect English and we were spellbound. To us it seemed that the war had suddenly stopped! Stopped to listen to this song from one of the enemy.

On Christmas Day itself, in some sectors of the line, there was no doubting the underlying friendly intent. Yet the men that took the initiative in initiating a truce were brave – or foolish – as was witnessed by Sergeant Frederick Brown:

Sergeant Collins stood waist high above the trench waving a box of Woodbines above his head. German soldiers beckoned him over, and Collins got out and walked halfway towards them, in turn beckoning someone to come and take the gift. However, they called out, “Prisoner!” A shot rang out, and he staggered back, shot through the chest. I can still hear his cries, “Oh my God, they have shot me!”

This was not a unique incident. Yet, despite the obvious risks, men were still tempted. Individuals would get off the trench, then dive back in, gradually becoming bolder as Private George Ashurst recalled:

It was grand, you could stretch your legs and run about on the hard surface. We tied an empty sandbag up with its string and kicked it about on top – just to keep warm of course. We did not intermingle. Part way through we were all playing football. It was so pleasant to get out of that trench from between them two walls of clay and walk and run about – it was heaven.

The idea that football matches were played between the British and Germans in No Man’s Land has taken a grip, but the evidence is intangible.

The truce was not planned or controlled – it just happened. Even senior officers recognised that there was little that could be done in this strange state of affairs. Brigadier General Lord Edward Gleichen accepted the truce as a fait accompli, but was keen to ensure that the Germans did not get too close to the ramshackle British trenches:

They came out of their trenches and walked across unarmed, with boxes of cigars and seasonable remarks. What were our men to do? Shoot? You could not shoot unarmed men. Let them come? You could not let them come into your trenches; so the only thing feasible was done – and our men met them half-way and began talking to them. Meanwhile our officers got excellent close views of the German trenches.

Another practical reason for embracing the truce was the opportunity it presented for burying the dead that littered No Man’s Land. Private Henry Williamson was assigned to a burial party:

The Germans started burying their dead which had frozen hard. Little crosses of ration box wood nailed together and marked in indelible pencil. They were putting in German, ‘For Fatherland and Freedom!’ I said to a German, “Excuse me, but how can you be fighting for freedom? You started the war, and we are fighting for freedom!” He said, “Excuse me English comrade, but we are fighting for freedom for our country!”

It should be noted that the truce was by no means universal, particularly where the British were facing Prussian units.

For the vast majority of the participants, the truce was a matter of convenience and maudlin sentiment. It did not mark some deep flowering of the human spirit, or signify political anti-war emotions taking root amongst the ranks. The truce simply enabled them to celebrate Christmas in a freer, more jovial, and, above all, safer environment, while satisfying their rampant curiosity about their enemies.

The truce could not last: it was a break from reality, not the dawn of a peaceful world. The gradual end mirrored the start, for any misunderstandings could cost lives amongst the unwary. For Captain Charles Stockwell it was handled with a consummate courtesy:

At 8.30am I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with ‘Merry Christmas!’ on it, and I climbed on the parapet. He put up a sheet with, ‘Thank you’ on it, and the German captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches – he fired two shots in the air and the war was on again!

In other sectors, the artillery behind the lines opened up and the bursting shells soon shattered the truce.

War regained its grip on the whole of the British sector. When it came to it, the troops went back to war willingly enough. Many would indeed have rejoiced at the end of the war, but they were still willing to accept orders, still willing to kill Germans. Nothing had changed.

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The light in the Orkneys is so clear, so bright, so lucid, it feels like you are on top of the world looking though thin clouds into heaven.

It doesn’t even feel part of the UK: when you sail off the edge of Scotland by the Scrabster to Stromness ferry, you feel you are departing the real world to land in a magical realm.

Nowhere else on earth can you go to a place and see eight thousand years of continuous history in such a tiny space.

Skara Brae is what remains of a neolithic village, older than Stonehenge and the pyramids, kept secret underground until uncovered by a severe storm in 1850. You can walk in and sit down, look around at the stone walls, stone beds, stone cupboards, dressers, seats, and storage boxes. Recognizably human people lived here, seeing this same landscape and coast, feeling the same wind on their faces that you do, their eyes resting on the doors, hearths and toilets (one in each dwelling).

This is ‘stone age’ but talking about such ages is a misnomer in the Orkneys where they had no appreciable bronze age nor iron age so proceeded from the non-use of one metal to the non-use of another in what is now the best preserved neolithic site in Europe.

The Orkneys have been so fascinating for so long that even the vandalism needs to be preserved. In Maeshowe burial mound you can see where Viking tourists who came to the monument, already ancient by their time, wrote graffiti about their girlfriends on the walls. They wrote in Norse runes.

The Orkney islands were the headquarters of the Viking invasion fleets, and to this day the Orkneys are the only place in the world besides Norway where the Norwegian national day is celebrated.

The islands are filled with Tolkeinesque place names like the Ring of Brodgar, the Brough of Birsay, the Standing Stones of Stenness. Sagas were born here, like that of the peaceable 12th century Earl of Orkney, treacherously assassinated and now known as St Magnus, after whom the cathedral is named.

Sagas were created here in living memory. This is where the British home fleet was at anchor and the German fleet still lies. The battle fleet of the German Imperial Navy transferred in its entirety to Scapa Flow in 1919 to await a decision on its future. The German sailors could not bring themselves to give up their ships; they opened the seacocks and scuttled them all. At low tide you can still see the rusting hulks of Wilhelmine ambitions to dominate Europe.

If the Orkneys sound bleak and rocky, that would be the wrong impression to leave. They have rich and fertile farming land with green plains rolling on under a pearl sky. People tell folk tales around the peat fires, drinking ginger-flavoured whiskey; an orange cat pads around the grain heaps in the Highland Park distillery, and the islands shimmer under the ‘simmer dim’ of nightless summer days. I should be there now.

Headline image credit: Stromness, Orkney Islands by Geoff Wong. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Christmas is being held on December 25th this year, so you’ve only got a few weeks left to find something decent to give your family and friends. But never tremble with frostbitten fear! Because there are still places you can go, events you can take part in, and presents you can get for your demanding little sister. But… only if you’re British. Sorry, everywhere else in the World!

Today see the Leeds Alternative Comics Fair take place for the 5th consecutive year, promising a great lineup of small press and self-published creators and makers such as Kristyna Baczynski, Adam Cadwell, Gareth Brookes and organisers Steve Tillotson and Hugh Raine. Held at Nation of Shopkeepers in Leeds (which is a BAR), it’s a great, fun event, and will be running today. Oh! You’d better run!

We also see Newcastle’s Canny Comic Con kick off today, with guests including Bryan and Mary Talbot, Gary Erskine, Al Ewing and those Art Hero boys everybody’s talking about nowadays. Another festive tradition in Britain, the CCC is another brilliant way to find some last-minute (you still have several weeks, but I like to instil fear in an audience) presents for people.

Oh, but again – that’s happening today. You’d better run! Again!

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By Charlotte Buxton

In July 1917, after three years of bloody war, anti-German feeling in Britain was reaching a feverish peak. Xenophobic mutterings about the suitability of having a German on the throne had been heard since 1914. The fact that the Royal family shared part of its name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with the Gotha bombers responsible for the devastating recent raids on London turned these whispers into open cries.

In response, King George V – resenting any aspersions on his patriotism – changed the name of the British Royal family to the impeccably English-sounding Windsor. This act signalled the power of names in a society heavy with newly coined, derogatory labels for the enemy: from Jerry to Fritz, through the Krauts, the Boche, and the Hun, you needed to know who you were fighting, and why, it was felt.

But jingoism was not the only source of linguistic creativity in the period. The circumstances of the First World War were so horrific, so extraordinary, and involving so many millions of people that a new language was almost essential. Many words which emerged at the time have clear associations with the conflict, such as camouflage, blimp, aerobatics, demob, and shell shock. Others have a more complex history, emerging from soldiers’ slang; itself a product of the increased cosmopolitanism ushered in by the war.

Take me back to dear old Blighty

Before the war, many of the young Tommies (a term deriving from ‘Thomas Atkins’, which was used on specimen army documents from 1815 as the name of a typical private soldier) who were shipped abroad to fight had probably never ventured far beyond the villages in which they were born. Suddenly immersed in exotic, unfamiliar cultures, both their longing for home and their assimilation of their new surroundings are summed up in one word: Blighty.

Meaning Britain or England, but especially ‘home’, Blighty originated in the Indian army, as an anglicization of the Hindustani bilāyatī, wilāyatī meaning ‘foreign, European’. First recorded in print in 1915, Blighty was an ideal place of comfort, love, and security, sharply contrasting with the hideous discomfort, harsh discipline, and constant danger of the front, and remains a popular term amongst Brits for their homeland to this day. Less familiar is the word’s extended use, which popped up on the television programme Downton Abbey recently, when the conniving footman Thomas Barrow deliberately injures his hand in order to escape the trenches. In the programme, this war wound is referred to as a ‘Blighty’ – a popular term at the time for any injury serious enough to get its victim sent back home, hopefully for good.

Less extreme than a Blighty was a cushy wound – one which was not serious enough to get you sent home permanently, but which would usually buy some time away from the trenches. Deriving from the Hindu for ‘pleasure’, ḵushī, the word’s more familiar sense of ‘undemanding, easy, or secure’ developed at the same time. This has stuck in the language to this day, with ‘cushy job’ a particularly popular phrase in the Oxford English Corpus. In North America cushy is now also used to refer to a particularly comfy sofa or other piece of furniture – far removed, one might think, from its starting point in the mud and gore of battle.

From the trenches to the street

British soldiers adopted the language of their enemies just

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The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag

 Bradley, Alan. (2010) The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag. (The Flavia de Luce Series) Bantam, division of Random House. ISBN 978-0385343459. Litland recommends ages 14-100!

 Publisher’s description:  Flavia de Luce, a dangerously smart eleven-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders, thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacey are over—until beloved puppeteer Rupert Porson has his own strings sizzled in an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. But who’d do such a thing, and why? Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she’s letting on? What about Porson’s charming but erratic assistant? All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can’t solve—without Flavia’s help. But in getting so close to who’s secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head? (Bantam Books)

 Our thoughts:

 Flavia De Luce is back and in full force! Still precocious. Still brilliant. Still holding an unfortunate fascination with poisons…

 As with the first book of the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, we begin with a seemingly urgent, if not sheer emergency, situation that once again turns out to be Flavia’s form of play.  We also see the depth of her sister’s cruelty as they emotionally badger their little sister, and Flavia’s immediate plan for the most cruel of poisoned deaths as revenge. Readers will find themselves chuckling throughout the book!

 And while the family does not present the best of role models (smile), our little heroine does demonstrate good character here and there as she progresses through this adventure. As explained in my first review on this series, the protagonist may be 11 but that doesn’t mean the book was written for 11-year olds :>) For readers who are parents, however (myself included), we shudder to wonder what might have happened if we had bought that chemistry kit for our own kids!

 Alas, the story has much more to it than mere chemistry. The author’s writing style is incredibly rich and entertaining, with too many amusing moments to even give example of here. From page 1 the reader is engaged and intrigued, and our imagination is easily transported into  the 1950’s Post WWII England village. In this edition of the series, we have more perspective of Flavia as filled in by what the neighbors know and think of her. Quite the manipulative character as she flits  around Bishop’s Lacy on her mother’s old bike, Flavia may think she goes unnoticed but begins to learn not all are fooled…

 The interesting treatment of perceptions around German prisoners of war from WWII add historical perspective, and Flavia’s critical view of villagers, such as the Vicar’s mean wife and their sad relationship, fill in character profiles with deep colors. Coupled with her attention to detail that helps her unveil the little white lies told by antagonists, not a word is wasted in this story.

 I admit to being enviou

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A Merciless Place is a story lost to history for over two hundred years; a dirty secret of failure, fatal misjudgement and desperate measures which the British Empire chose to forget almost as soon as it was over.

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By Michael Biggs and Steven Knauss

The BNP’s membership list was leaked in November 2008 by a disgruntled activist who had been expelled late in 2007; he has since admitted responsibility and been convicted. The BNP never challenged the list’s authenticity, merely stating that it was out of date. The list is apparently a complete record of membership at November–December 2007. Of the 13,009 individuals listed, 30 were missing a current address, 138 had a foreign address, and 41 lived in Northern Ireland. Of the remaining members, 12,536 (97.9 per cent) can be precisely located in Britain using the postcode field of their address (Office of National Statistics, 2004, 2008). Postcodes provide exceptionally fine resolution, down to the street level.

The distribution of members diverges significantly from the distribution of voters.  The correlation of votes with membership, across the 628 constituencies in Britain, is surprisingly modest (r ¼ 0.46). The party contested only one in five seats, but the correlation is scarcely higher in those alone. Voting also gives a misleading impression of the national distribution of the party’s support. Wales and Scotland provide over three times the proportion of members compared with voters.

Members must be matched with a population denominator. Data come from the 2001 Census, conducted in April. The great majority of members on the leaked list had joined since this date, as the BNP had 2,173 members in November 2001 (Copsey, 2008: 137). The BNP recruited only ‘indigenous Caucasian’ people (Copsey, 2008: 238). We count adults who defined their ethnicity as ‘White British’, including ‘White Scottish’. The proportion of white British adults belonging to the BNP was 0.032 per cent across Britain.

For statistical analysis, we use the finest geographical unit defined by the Census, the ‘output area’. This is a very small neighbourhood; the median covers an area of 6 hectares and contains 280 people. There are 218,038 neighbourhoods (as they will be termed) in Britain: the BNP was present in 10,165 (4.7 per cent) of them. Most of those had a single member; 11 was the maximum. The highest proportion was 5.7 per cent.

We begin with independent variables capturing economic insecurity. These are measured ecologically, as the fraction of people in the neighbourhood with a particular characteristic, though they are proxies for individual characteristics predicting support for the BNP. Education is divided into three categories: no qualifications, qualifications below university degree, and degree (denominated by people aged 16–74 years). Class is divided into five categories, from routine and semi-routine to managerial and professional (denominated by occupied population). The unemployment rate is also measured (denominated by the economically active). Alongside these sociological staples, housing is included because the BNP promotes the myth that foreigners are given privileged access to public housing. Housing tenure is divided into three categories: owned or mortgaged, rented from the local authority, and private rental (including other arrangements). Overcrowding, as defined by the Census, is also measured. (In both cases the denominator is households.) We expect, then, that white British adults are more likely to belong to the BNP in neighbourhoods with lower education, lower social class, higher unemployment, more private renting, and greater overcrowding. Control variables are entered to reflect findings that BNP voters are disproportionately male and middle aged (Ford and Goodwin, 2010; Cutts et al., 2011). Additional controls are population density and the proportion of people living in communal establishments like prisons.

For Hypotheses 1–3, we defin

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By Patrick Wright

On 1 October 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, the urbane professor of interior design who had been director of architecture at the Festival of Britain, found himself standing by the Tiananmen Gate in the ancient and still walled city of Peking. In China to present a statement of friendship signed by nearly 700 British scientists and artists, he was watching a parade that the reporter James Cameron reckoned to be “the greatest show on earth”. First came the troops and the “military ironwork”, grinding past for a full hour. This was followed by a much longer civil parade in which the people marched by in barely imaginable numbers, beaming with joy at their elevated leaders who gazed back with the slightly “subdued” expression of still unaccustomed new emperors.

The spectacle with which China celebrated the fifth anniversary of the communist liberation was brilliantly organised, as Casson felt obliged to admit. He was less impressed by the admiring expressions worn by many of the other international guests: “Gold-rimmed spectacles misted with emotion, cheeks creased with years of well-meant service in this cause or in that, shirts defiantly open at the neck, badges in lapels, and there in the middle – could it have been? – an MCC tie.” That particular specimen was Ivor Montagu, a cricket-loving friend and translator of the great Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein.

Sickened by the rapture of the communist regime’s ardent western friends, Casson quickly retreated to the shaded “rest room” beneath the viewing stand. Here he lingered among yellow-robed Tibetan lamas, sipping tea and exchanging impressions with other doubtful Britons: the classically minded and no longer Marxist novelist and poet Rex Warner, and AJ Ayer, the high-living logical positivist who would come home to tell the BBC that China’s parade had reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies.

Enraptured or appalled, none of these British witnesses appears to have regretted the absence of Stanley Spencer. The 63-year-old painter, so famously associated with the little Berkshire village of Cookham, had managed to escape the entire show – thanks, he later explained, to “some Mongolians”, whose timely arrival at the hotel that morning had provided the cover under which he retreated upstairs to his room.

It was the discovery that Spencer had been to China that persuaded me to look further into this forgotten episode. I soon realised that an extraordinary assortment of Britons had made their way to China in 1954, nearly two decades before 1972, when President Nixon made the stage-managed and distinctly operatic visit that has gone down in history as the moment when the west entered rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China. Were these motley British visitors just credulous idiots, for whom “Red China” was another version of the legendary Cathay? That is what the 24-year-old Douglas Hurd and the other diplomats in the British embassy compound in Peking appear to have suspected of these unwelcome freeloaders. Or was something more significant going on?

Nowadays, the rapidly increasing number of British travellers to China think nothing of getting on a plane to fly directly there. Yet Spencer had good reason to feel “trembly” as he and the five other members of his entirely unofficial cultural delegation approached the runway at Heathrow on 14 September 1954. Though Britain had recognised China a few months after the liberation, it had yet to establish proper diplomatic relations with the communist-led government, and the embarking Britons couldn’t pick up a visa until they had reached Prague. That meant crossing the iron curtain dividing Europe. “Did you go under or over it?” one joker would later ask, making light of a passage that was

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I couldn’t help noticing this story, which states that many of the names still popular in English-speaking countries originate from the Normans, who won control of England in 1066. Meanwhile, names that were popular in England at the time – such as Aethelred, Eadric, and Leofric – have disappeared. With that in mind, I turned to Babies’ Names, by Patrick Hanks and Kate Hardcastle, to find out more about Norman names. Below are a selection, along with their meanings.

Adele This was borne by a 7th-century saint, a daughter if the Frankish King Dagobert II. It was also the name of William the Conqueror’s youngest daughter (c. 1062-1137), who became the wife of Stephen of Blois. The name went out of use in England in the later Middle Ages, and was revived in the 19th century. It is the stage name of English singer-songwriter Laurie Blue Atkins (b. 1988).

Alison From a very common medieval name, a Norman French diminutive of Alice. It virtually died out in England in the 15th century, but survived in Scotland, with the result that until its revival in England in the 20th century it had a strongly Scottish flavour. The usual spelling in North America is Allison.

Bernard Norman and Old French name of Germanic (Frankish) origin, meaning ‘bear-hardy’. This was borne by three famous medieval churchmen: St Bernard of Menthon (923-1008), founder of a hospice on each of the Alpine passes named after himl; the monastic reformer St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153); and the scholastic philosopher Bernard of Chartres.

Emma Old French name, of Germanic (Frankish) origin, originally a short form of compound names such as Ermintrude, containing the word erm(en), irm(en) ‘entire’. It was adopted by the Normans and introduced by them to Britain. Its popularity in medieval England was greatly enhanced by the fact that it had been borne by the mother of Edward the Confessor, herself a Norman.

Hugh From an Old French name, Hugues, of Germanic (Frankish) origin derived from hug ‘heart’, ‘mind’, ’spirit’. It was originally a short form of various compound names containing this element. This was borne by the aristocracy of medieval France, adopted by the Normans, and introduced by them to Britain.

Leonard From an Old French personal name of Germanic origin, derived from leon ‘lion’ + hard ‘hardy’, ‘brave’, ’strong’. This was the name of a 5th-century Frankish saint, the patron of peasants and horses. Although it was introduced into Britain by the Normans, Leonard was not a particularly common name during the Middle Ages. It was revived in the 19th century and became very popular. The spelling Lennard is also found.

Rosalind From an Old French personal name of Germanic (Frankish) origin, from hros ‘horse’ + lind ‘weak’, ‘tender’, ’soft’. It was adopted by the Normans and introduced by them to Britain. Its popularity as a given name owes much to its use by Edmund Spenser for the character of a shepherdess in his pastoral poetry, and by Shakespeare as the name of the heroine in As You Like It.

William Probably the most successful of all the Old French names of Germanic origin that were introduced to England by the Normans. It is derived from Germanic wil ‘will’, ‘desire’ + helm ‘helmet’, ‘protection’. The fact that it was borne by the Conqueror himself does not seem to have inhibited its favour with

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Stanley Wolpert is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.  His book, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India, provides a vivid behind-the-scenes look at Britain’s decision to divest itself from the crown jewel of its empire.  A decision which uprooted over ten million people, 500,000 to a million of whom died in the ensuing inferno.  In the excerpt below we learn about August of 1947, a particularly ruthless time that followed partition.

Lahore’s railway station became a veritable death trap by August 12, Justice Gopal Das Khosla reported.  “On the evening of August 11, the railway station was packed with passengers…when news came that the Sind Express, on its way to Lahore, had been attacked by Muslims, panic spread…They found that men, women and children had been brutally murdered and were lying in pools of blood…The dead bodies were carried across several platforms…while all that was visible in the city of Lahore was a huge tower of smoke.”  Passengers on the Frontier Mail were murdered near Wagah.  Next day no Hindu or Sikh reached Lahore station alive; Muslim gangs were prowling the environs of the city in armed packs.  In June 1947 some 300,000 Hindus and Sikhs lived in Lahore.  By August 19 fewer than 10,000 remained; and by August 30, fewer than one thousand.  Endless caravans of Hindi-Sikh refugees moved out of that smoking pyre of death, trekking west to try and reach the new Punjab border at Wagah, twenty miles away, hoping to stay alive for another twenty miles to Amritsar.

“Nearly the whole of India celebrated the coming of independence, but not so the unhappy…Punjab,” Prime Minister Nehru broadcast to his nation on August 19.  “Both in the East and the West, there was disaster and sorrow…There was murder and arson and looting in many places and streams of refugees poured out from one place to another.”  Three days later he wrote to Gandhi in despair, “All this killing business has reached a stage of complete madness, and vast populations are deserting their habitations and trekking to the west or to the east.”  But Gandhi was not surprised.  When the Congress Party first passed its resolution favoring Partition, he had warned that the “only peace” Partition would bring India was “the peace of the grave.”  He stayed for a week in Calcutta with Suhrawardy, trying to pacify raucous crowds of Bengalis, who were at first moved by the symbolism of Hindu-Muslim friendship and unity presented by this “odd couple” of old leaders living together in a burned-out building.  Having “drunk the poison of mutual hatred,” as Gandhi explained it, “this nectar of fraternization tastes all the sweeter.”  But it did not last very long.  “What was regarded as a miracle has proved a short-lived nine-day wonder,” Gandhi confessed to Vallabhbhai Patel, after he was almost killed by brick-throwing students who rudely awakened him, compelling him to launch a fast in response.  “Today we have lost all our senses, we have become stupid,” Gandhi cried aloud at his prayer meeting in Delhi the next month.  “It is not only the Sikhs have gone mad, or only the Hindus or the Muslims….India is today in the plight of the [sinking] elephant king [a Hindu fable]…What should I do?”  He wanted to fly to Lahore in Pak

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Patrick Wright is a writer and broadcaster with an interest in the cultural and political dimensions of modern history.  Having started writing A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London while working for the National Council for Voluntary Organizations, he is now a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium.  A Journey Through Ruins views the transformation of the Britain through the unexpected prism of everyday life in East London. Below is an excerpt about London Fields.  If you will be in London this summer, perhaps you should pick up a copy of Wright’s book and read about your surroundings as you travel.

Hackney was once a place of pastures and market gardens.  Samuel Pepys practised archery here.  Even today there is a public park in the borough known as London Fields.  It is a place of modest attractions: some fine old plane trees, a new community centre, an open-air lido that, were it not for local objectors, the council would already have demolished.  In the early morning, before the dogs come out, it is often full of seagulls.

Trains rattle by overhead.  London Fields borders on the Cambridge line, and it’s not a bad spot from which to observe passing academics.  They stare back glumly, thanking their lucky stars for Grantchester Meadows and mistaking the figures on the ground for woebegone residents of the Victorian East End.  It’s easy to imagine them adding those contemporary asides that keep turning up in scholarly studies of Dickens, Dore, or life as it was in outcast London: ‘Even today, one only has to take the train from Liverpool Street Station…’.

London Fields certainly has its dismal aspect.  There have been vicious assaults.  Huge and unattended dogs run free.  Young children from the nearby travellers’ site invade the infants’ playground in a terrifying and unbelievably foul-mouthed pack (not for them the clip on the ear with which Richard North once hoped to improve the area).  As I walked out on Sunday afternoon I came across a Ford Cortina parked up against the railings: it was emitting grunts and rocking.

But despite the malevolence that sometimes drifts across it, London Fields also clings to an understated respectability.  On most days of the year, it is an uneventful and slightly melancholy place.  If it has a message for the world it is no longer the progressive Victorian one about the uplifting and civilizing effect of open spaces-green lungs as they used to be called-on the nation’s most down-trodden souls.  These days the park promises nothing so ambitious.  It merely points out that people can be poor without always being beastly; that, no matter what writers like Tom Wolfe may suggest, the inhabitants of the inner city can get by without raping, mugging and insulting each other at every encounter.

The park remains uncelebrated, but its name is too good to be true.  ‘London Fields…’.  It doesn’t take a master class in poetry to reveal the contemporary resonances of that archaic conjunction.  In these ecological days ‘London Fields’ has come into its own as a prime piece of nomenclature, a movable asset that is far too good to be squandered on an obscure dog-patch in Hackney.

The estate agents were the first to act.  Assisted by the usual clutch of lifestyle journalists, they went out one night in the early Eighties, levered the name up from that tired stretch of municipal ground, and humped it half a mile down the road.  No longer confined to the park or the dishevelled part-industrial part-Bohemian zone around the railway arches on its east-side, ‘London Fields’ was now the new name for Mapledene-a pleasant and, as we know, relatively unbroken area of Victorian terraced housing that, through this act of renaming, was now being pulled away from the abysmal Holly Street Estate at its western edge. ‘London Fields’ was still a place of leafy respite, but it had become one that could be bought and sold: a rediscovered ‘village’ within walking distance of the city.

John Milne was the first writer to offer us London Fields, the novel.  He had grown up in a council flat in the area and though his story, issued by Heinemann in 1983, was shy of highbrow presumptions, his publishers were still serious enough to adorn it with somewhat patronizing recommendations from David Lodge (Mr Milne has talent’) and Auberon Waugh (’Mr Milne seems to represent a new development in the English novel’).

Milne is good on detail, but at heart his London Fields was a conventional fable of working-class male endeavour.  Its hero was determined to break away from the poverty of his circumstances: the string of wretched jobs, the dismal estates, the cruelly observed pregnant wife with her nylon dressing-gown and her stifling need for security.  He turns to athleticism, and then, via an exotic inter-racial affair (’She was ebony, pure shining carved ebony’), to the underworld of drugs, black clubs and serious crime.  Milne’s London Fields is a place of confinement and stunted prospects.  The escape route is enticing but it leads inevitable to gaol.

Then, in 1989, Martin Amis came along with the book that swept John Milne’s effort into oblivion.  By the time Amis has finished with it, London Fields isn’t a place at all.  Instead it’s a monstrous condition, a post-modern pile-up at the end of another millennium.  London Fields has become the immortal void where the time-expired allegories of British life go to mutate.  There’s suicide and murder.  There’s imminent nuclear catastrophe and a dark collapsing sky.  There are gross couplings, and they’re not discreetly hidden in a Ford Cortina either.  At one point in the performance, an unprecedented gale bursts into fell thirty-three million trees: all in a single stroke of the Ring Master’s hormonal, mid-Atlantic prose.  People round here may well wonder what Martin Amis thinks he’s doing to their park.

The Nasty Young Man of English letters grows apocalyptic with age.  These days he creeps into London Fields like repentant mugger and practises being human.  He’s achieved some results through these exertions: an abstract devotion to the planet, for example, and a fatal softness for babies.  Nevertheless, he’s still doing horrible things to women and children.  Amis’s American narrator is less of a worry.  He flew into London saying ‘I want time to go to London Fields’, but he died on the way through.  He’ll never know that, despite all his millennialist huffing and puffing, the plane trees in Hackney’s park are still standing.  It’s unlikely anyone in the area will miss him.

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NOTE TO SELF: THIS MAN WAS ELECTED TO SERVE HIS CONSTITUENTS?


"It is time that the dyslexia industry was killed off and we recognised that there are well-known methods for teaching everybody to read and write."
Graham Stringer MP


Nobody said that politicians had to be smart to get elected. Case in point, a British Labor Member of Parliment who commented in an online column that dyslexia was a myth perpetrated by educators to cover up poor teaching.

I'm sure those who are in education must have been in shock to read this statement.

The politician, one Graham Stringer, described the condition as "cruel fiction" and should be consigned to the "dustbin of history." Furthermore, he says he believes that many children can't read or write because - well - merely the wrong teaching methods are used.

Silly teachers! All those years of university to acquire knowledge and know-how to pass on to young, fertile minds only to hear from a non-teacher that they have been using the wrong methods. It's so...logical! Were that only the case...

Responding to the politician's conclusion, Charity Dyslexia Action said that dyslexia was real to the six million people in the UK who were affected by the condition.

In the column, which appeared in the Manchester Confidential, Stringer opined that millions of pounds were wasted on specialist teaching for what he labeled, a "false" condition. He also wrote that children should instead be taught to read and write by using a system called, synthetic phonics.

And the politico knows this...how?

"To label children as dyslexic because they're confused by poor teaching methods is wicked.
If dyslexia really existed then countries as diverse as Nicaragua and South Korea would not have been able to achieve literacy rates of nearly 100%. There can be no rational reason why this 'brain disorder' is of epidemic proportions in Britain but does not appear in South Korea or Nicaragua."

Financial considerations appear to be a factor in his statements. He wrote that "currently, 35,500 students receive disability allowances for dyslexia at an annual cost of £78.4m."

Furthermore, certified dyslexics get longer in exams.

Makes sense to me. If you have trouble reading/understanding the question, it takes longer to write an answer!

Read the rest of Stringer's beliefs and reader's comments and reactions related to the story, here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/7828121.stm

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I thought you all might be getting a little fatigued with your Presidential race (I may be wrong) so I thought that this week’s Very Short Introductions column might come as a welcome break. Dr Tony Wright, the Member of Parliament for Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, is the author of British Politics: A Very Short Introduction. He has kindly answered a few questions on politics on this side of the pond.

OUP: You talk in the opening chapter of your book about the confusion between Britain, England, and the United Kingdom. Eight years into devolution, do you think the confusion has improved or got worse?

TONY WRIGHT: There is a lot more attention to this issue now, inevitably so. Independence is on the agenda for Scotland now that the nationalists are in government, and there is more focus on the English question too in terms of England’s place in the union and a growth in Englishness. It is no longer possible to use words interchangeably as it once was. But much is still confused!

OUP: “The British enjoy a marvellous constitutional illiteracy. They think pluralism is a lung disease. This is not because they have no constitution… but because they have a constitution of a peculiar kind.” Can you briefly explain our peculiar constitution for our non-British readers?

WRIGHT: It’s the peculiarities of a constitution that has been made up over time, adjusting to circumstances, and never taken in hand or written down in a joined-up way. That’s why it’s been called a ‘political’ constitution. Whether we can go on like that in the future is less clear than it once was.

OUP: Is Britain still “the home of strong government”?

WRIGHT: In key respects, yes. There are more checks now (such as the Human Rights Act) but executive power is still largely in place. Just compare the different responses to the financial crisis in the UK and USA. In the latter Congress was central - in Britain, Parliament was not even sitting!

OUP: Back in 2003 you wrote a piece for The Guardian newspaper calling for an end to political spin. Has this been achieved?

WRIGHT: I called for an end to outrageous and excessive spin, and I do think it has been reined back from then. But spin of some kind is intrinsic to politics - it just has to be kept in check and not allowed into areas (like the civil service and official information and statistics) where it should have no place.

OUP: Once people have read your British Politics: A Very Short Introduction, which books would you point them too next?

WRIGHT: I would suggest Anthony King, The British Constitution and David Marquand, Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy.

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We recently launched Powers of Persuasion: The Inside Story of British Advertising by Winston Fletcher. Today, I am pleased to be able to bring you an original essay by Winston on the period where the British led the way in the advertising world. Check back tomorrow for photos from the party at London’s Somerset House.

Conventional wisdom has it that America is the home of advertising, where it all began. That is not quite right. Unquestionably America is the world’s largest advertising market, and American advertising agencies now dominate the world. But advertising began in ancient Athens (if not earlier), and advertising agencies started in Britain more than a century before they appeared in the USA. During 1970s and early 1980s British advertising led the world. It did so creatively – but it did so in other ways too, which underpinned the creativity, making it more effective and successful.

The emergence of Britain started slowly. At the Cannes Festival, which was then – and still is – the arbiter of global advertising creativity, Britain was outpaced by the USA throughout the 1960s, and in 1970 and 1971. Then the British climb began. In 1972 British and American advertising agencies took home an equal number of Gold Lions (4 apiece), and Britain won the cinema Grand Prix. The next year Britain won more awards than any other country, though most of these were Silvers.

In 1974 the British Gold rush really got going. That year Britain collected 18 Gold and Silver Lions and the Palme D’Or. In 1975 the festival moved to Venice for a year, and the British trade press headline simply read ‘Venice Goes British’. Come 1976 the festival returned to Cannes and the headline ran: ‘Britain Sweeps The Board’. The Brits had again pocketed the Palme D’Or, plus 10 of the 19 Gold Lions. In 1977 it was ‘Britain Comes Out Best Again’, with the Grand Prix for television and another 6 Gold Lions. Then, in 1978, Britain reached its zenith. The Brits won the Grand Prix for both television and cinema – a rare occurrence – and garnered a massive 80 Gold, Silver and Bronze Lions.

After 5 years at the top, there followed a couple of relatively fallow, but not wholly unsuccessful, years (1979 & 1980). But in 1981 the British made a come back (‘Britain Comes out Best Again’) with more Gold and Silver Lions than any other country. And Britain’s creative leadership continued throughout the first half of the new decade, when it collected 45 Gold Lions against America’s 23.

What caused this burgeoning of British advertising creativity? A combination of factors. Commercial television had begun in Britain in 1955, and for the first two decades British television advertising was dominated by American advertisers – particularly household cleanser and other packaged goods advertisers, whose approach to creativity was strictly formulaic. Every commercial had to abide by the ‘proven rules’. During the 1970s British advertisers started to become much more important in their home markets, and more confident, and allowed British creativity much more freedom. Creativity flowers in freedom. Moreover this occurred against the background of a recovery in Britain’s economic performance, after a long period of economic tribulation. But probably most important of all, there happened to be in London during those years a raft of quite exceptionally talented advertising people, who worked both as colleagues and as rivals to outperform each other creatively, in a highly charged competitive atmosphere.

Additionally, their creativity was underpinned by other developments which also helped British advertising leap ahead. More or less simultaneously, two London agencies (Boase Massimi Pollitt and J Walter Thompson London) invented a new system of campaign development called ‘account planning’. Account planning integrated research into the creative process in a way that had not been done before, and in a way that creative people found far more sympathetic than they had found earlier systems. Account planning spread slowly at first, but it is now generally accepted around the globe as the best way to develop new campaigns.

At the same time, in the mid-1970s. Britain developed the world’s best system of advertising self-regulation – a system that maximises creative freedoms within responsible constraints. And advertising began to be used more and more by British Governments to promote worthwhile social causes, from blood-giving to drink-less driving. Simultaneously Britain began to build what has become the world’s largest advertising archive, ‘The History of Advertising Trust.’ Out of this ferment of activity two commercial giants emerged: Saatchi & Saatchi and the WPP Group. Both joined the world’s advertising leaders, though Saatchi & Saatchi later stumbled and fell.

For the British advertising industry the second half of the 20th century was a heady era – when it reached peaks that it will probably never quite achieve again.

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by Sam Enthoven Razor Bill / Penguin 2008 Let's play a game of Mental Picture and see how things go. First, imagine two giant monsters throwing down like a couple of WWF wrestlers in a large metropolitan city. Sort of like in a Godzilla movie, with both of these monsters a couple hundred feet tall, tossing each other into famous landmarks and obliterating the skyline. One of them is a

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