This book can be described as an 'oblique memoir'. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s). It also includes the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word. The book also explains how forced exile persists through generations through a family history. It showcases the differences between English and American cultures. The book focuses on the incidence of cancers caused by exposure to radioactivity in England, and the impact it had on Anglo-American relations.
Isle of Man. The ‘internment of aliens’ – a peculiar and rather hysterical measure taken by the British government after Dunkirk. He had only been married for four months. But I suspect he really enjoyed the ironic freedom of that year. This is my father as an alien. He is alien to Britain and to English culture. Surrounded by those who are not alien to him, he is captured in an alien environment. And this image of him as the central figure is one which is entirely alien to me. His existence on the edges of my childhood, his refusal to engage with me or to challenge
suggesting that English culture did not encourage a spirit of bold, risk-taking entrepreneurship or a belief that the principle of making profit should be extended to all forms of activity, and that these attitudes, stemming most of all from the public schools, were a vital factor in Britain’s relative economic decline.6 Racing provides a less simplistic model. On the one hand it should be clear that racing was never a profit-maximising industry dominated by commercial values. With only rare exceptions, racecourses never tried to maximise dividends. Most owners and some
. Exacting anxieties have haunted his witness of his journey from the ‘exotic’ periphery to the centre of English culture through the practice of a vocation he idealises and conceptualises with such rigid conservatism. Negotiating the periphery In 1958, on the eve of the Notting Hill riots, Naipaul saw himself as an ‘exotic writer’, ‘liv[ing] in England and depend[ing] on an English
, he might be considered a transatlantic Jewish writer. In his review of The Mighty Walzer , Cheyette saw Jacobson as occupying the vanguard of a new generation of British Jewish writers who were storming the citadel of the British literary-critical establishment: ‘By turning his past into fiction of the highest order, he has shown that those once excluded from English culture are now its custodians’ ( Cheyette 1999 : 9). Fourteen years later, Gilbert credited Jacobson with having ‘set the tone for a new generation of British-Jewish writers by confronting the
by the love games in Jane Eyre, and, especially, the daring representation of a sensual heroine who challenged patriarchal power and claimed the right of self-possession. Brontë’s exploration of these themes fused elements of Gothic literature with the domestic, so that, as Elaine Showalter argues in The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, her writing ‘shows an evolution from Romantic stereotypes of female insanity to a brilliant interrogation of the meaning of madness in women’s daily lives’.3 The images Brontë conjured up of female
Anti-popery had a paradoxical position in early modern English culture as both a pivotal point of unity and a potent mechanism of fracture. From the break with Rome into the early seventeenth century, anti-popery was a baseline ideology unifying Protestants in what they were against even if they could not agree on what they were for. Plotting the past into Revelation’s schema defined the English church as a martyred true church persecuted by the papal Antichrist and provided post-Reformation England
publishers instead proceeds on the opposite basis. The lament is not for the loss of black innocence but for that lost possession of imperial power, which itself takes on the aura of a pure and innocent condition. Apartheid is lamented for driving a fatal wedge between the empire and ‘its’ black subjects. The violence that apartheid has done is primarily to its white English ‘victims’; it is their authentic culture, not that of black South Africans, that has been destroyed. And part of that English culture is its dynamic developmentalism. Events of 1948 have removed from
of childhood in medieval English culture attends to the differences suggested by Jorgensen and Garrison by using the term ‘household’ rather than ‘family’ to discuss these kinship networks, which, during the medieval period, often exceeded nuclear and biological units. Ryan writes, ‘[a]cross the medieval period … [b]elonging to a household was a general principle of both productive and affective ties’. 39
exchanged with the same number from England. The latter would raise families of English culture or household economy – food, clothing, manner of life – the former would be widely distributed and absorbed in English culture. 23 But the attempted Anglicisation of Ireland was one instance only of a history of ambitions to transform identity, ranging from compulsory changes in religion, or dress, or language, through expulsion and colonisation, to mass killing. Attempts to destroy peoples, both by the killing or expulsion of their members, or by destroying their government