Since it was a prime social manifestation of the industrial revolution, the Victorian city more than merits serious attention by historians. It became the symbol of the de-ruralisation of the British (or more specifically, English) poor, and was the vehicle for the rise of the middle classes. These themes and others are discussed in detail
Thirty years ago Sandy Fawkes was a Daily Express reporter following a story in the southern states of the USA. She met a good-looking young man in a bar, and spent the next six days in his company, driving around with him, eating out, and sharing a bed. He was enigmatic and monosyllabic, but sufficiently
Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600by Eric RichardsHambledon & London, £19.95, pp. 388, ISBN 1852854413 In the middle of the 19th century, Londoners grumbled about the number of Italian urchins grinding barrel organs on street corners. Criminals and people-traffickers had brought many of them to Britain and their melody- making
All Archbishops of Canterbury fail. Dr Carey quotes Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang’s famous dictum: ‘The post is impossible for one man to do, but only one man can do it.’ It is not simply that there is too much for one man to do. The real problem is that the internal contradictions of Anglicanism have
Philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anonymous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff
The scriptwriter behind Troy, Brad Pitt’s new muscle and breastplate epic, sounds like an alpha-plus idiot. Commenting on his decision to leave the gods out of the film because he thought they wouldn’t impress audiences, David Benioff said, ‘I think that, if Homer was looking down on us, he would smile and say, “Take the
The introductory Apologia sets the scene: ‘These chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done … The central character — the “I” of each chapter — is myself.’ My Nine Lives is subtitled ‘Chapters of a Possible Past’ and that is what we are given: variations on
