Volume 35 Issue 4 April 1985

Change and Continuity in British History

Eric Hobsbawm has recently been honoured with a second Festschrift, The Power of the Past, edited by Pat Thane, Geoffrey Crossick and Roderick Floud, an appropriately unusual distinction for an unusually distinguished historian.

Down these Mean Streets the Historian Must Go

Go to a dinner party with unknown academics and you might well come away with the idea that for diversion they read Dostoevsky and Kafka, sparing the occasional sneering glance for the annual recipient of the Booker Prize. When you get to know them better, you are as likely to discover that they really devour thrillers on a massive scale.

For Posterity...

What use can historians make of those diaries which politicians keep for posterity – and rush into print? John Campbell considers two viewpoints of the 1964-1970 Wilson government, those of Richard Crossman and of Barbara Castle.

Museum Pieces

The building in which I work has a chequered past. One section was once a laboratory of physical chemistry; another, the old Cambridge Free School, whose hall still sports a splendid hammer-beam roof.

The Making of the Mendes Myth

Readers of Zuleika Dobson will recall the occasion when Mr Pedby, the Junior Fellow, read grace. As they listened to the false quantities of his Latin, the occupants of the high table experienced an unusual pleasure. They knew that they were present at an occasion which was to become an Oxford Legend.

There Died a Myriad...

War is prominent among the forms of human experience that have most readily stimulated poetry. In combat both mind and body strain at the end of their tether.

End of Empire

The British Empire was the largest in the history of the world. Brian Lapping explains how the end of that Empire was charted for television.

Mohawks, Axes and Taxes: Images of the American Revolution

At the Boston Tea Party the Americans not only flouted the unpopular tax laws on tea imposed on the colony, they also retrieved the image of the Mohawk from the hands of British cartoonists and reinstated him as the symbol of American liberty.