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‘Beware of the ninnies!’ – Thoughts on ballet history
Read more: ‘Beware of the ninnies!’ – Thoughts on ballet historySebastian Cody explores the challenges of ballet historiography, emphasising the need for rigorous scholarship amidst widespread inaccuracies
Huffing and Puffing but getting there: the ups and downs of historical research
By William Knox Violence is an area much neglected by Scottish historians unlike those working in other countries, such as England, Western Europe and the USA, where its study has become central to our understanding of social relations, in particular class and…
Apropos Written and yet to be Written Histories of Ancient Palestine and Israel
By Michael Nathanson The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, i.e., impasse over land ownership of the former mandatory Palestine, is rooted in and continuously being stoked by competing narratives. The Zionist movement adopted the master narrative of the Hebrew Bible, anchored by the…
The Post-Mortem of Labour Scotland
Three years ago, Gerry Hassan and I published a book entitled ‘The Strange Death of Labour Scotland’. We envisaged that, unless radical steps were taken, Labour’s influence in Scotland would steadily decline. Speaking personally, I did not envisage a total…
Letters from Beyond: Sir Politic Would-Be Emails the author
Dear Bob, ‘Tis I, Would-Be, unicorn with panther’s breath. Are you aware, Bob, that Black Panthers are generally the melanistic color variant of either a leopard or jaguar? This may seem a petty inconsequential factoid but think of the poor…
Austerity Bites: Two 1980s British Road Movies
By Ieuan Franklin Where are the films being made today about ‘Austerity Britain’ that combine social realism and humour, as in The Full Monty (1997)? In my article for the Journal of British Cinema and Television last year I looked…
Call for Papers: Oxford Literary Review – Overpopulation
Global ‘overpopulation’, considered the central environmental issue in the 1970s, became an almost taboo topic in the twenty-first century, often dismissed as drawing attention away from international capitalism as the primary cause of poverty and environmental destruction and at worst catering to forms…
Agricultural improvement and India
In the May 2015 issue of the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, Eric Grant and Alistair Mutch explore the intertwined careers of Kenneth Murchison, surgeon, and Patrick Duff, General of the East India Company’s artillery in Bengal. Both men returned…
Guest Blog Post – Socrates: Mark Morris on Death and Dying
In 1917, Erik Satie faced a spiritual dilemma—the challenge of giving voice to death, to nothingness. The composer had begun setting fragments of Plato’s narrative account of Socrates’s final days and death. Satie wanted the music to be ‘as white…
Review of Stephan E. C. Wendehorst’s book British Jewry, Zionism and the Jewish State, 1936–1956
The history of twentieth century British-Jews, Stephan E. C. Wenderhorst’s book shows, offers valuable insights to the understanding of British history. In his extended review of the book, Arie Dubnov examines the way in which Wenderhost’s book, which he characterizes…
Gender and Family in the History of Christian Missions
The April 2015 issue of Studies in World Christianity is largely based on a handful of the many papers presented at the 24th meeting of the Yale–Edinburgh Group on the history of missions and world Christianity, held at New College,…