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Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain

A return to the grand themes

Wm. Roger Louis
I.B. Tauris, 320pp, £35,

Raymond Carr

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Raymond Carr reviews the new book from Wm. Roger Lewis

Between 1975 and today, under the direction of Professor Wm. Roger Louis, the British Studies Seminars of the University of Texas has organized 60 seminars on the modern history of Britain and has published a selection of the lectures in five volumes of which this is the most recent. It includes personal reminiscence. Graham Greene, the publisher not the novelist, relates his experiences in the book trade as modest English publishers are drawn into the financial arms of giant international corporations. There are scholarly specialist studies, one of which has 65 footnotes. The lectures run from the social implications of the work of the fashionable photographer Cecil Beaton to the bombing by the RAF of the villages of rebellious Iraqi tribes as the cheapest way to police and govern the country; from Grey Gowrie, himself a poet, on W. H. Auden as sustaining the tradition of making poetry accessible to the common man, to Barry Gough on Arthur Marder, the son of immigrant Jews who had to wrestle with anti-Semitic prejudice and the reluctance of governments to release official documents, to produce, by sheer industry and persistence, his great history of the Royal Navy. All in all, the Texan seminars have made a rich and challenging contribution to the history of Britain and its empire.

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