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Children, Charity and Magazines
Read more: Children, Charity and MagazinesA Q&A with the author of Philanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, 1840–1930: The Charitable Child.
British Youth Cultures and the Wider World
Pop music and youth culture are known to be among the great British exports of the late twentieth century. Be it teddy boys/girls or The Beatles, mods or the Sex Pistols, football hooligans or the Spice Girls, the seemingly rapid…
Venus Voluptas: The Desire of Gods and Men
It should not be ‘a matter of £ s d.’: The Crown estate, foreshore and the public interest
One of the reasons for the devolution of the management of the Scottish Crown estate property to the Scottish government in April 2017 was because of the perception that the Crown Estate Commissioners in London focussed too narrowly on securing…
You Don’t Know Jacques: Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and the Denial of Deconstruction
Fifty years have passed since the publication of Of Grammatology, and the Oxford Literary Review has dedicated its July 2018 issue to marking “The Age of Grammatology”. In my contribution to this issue, Misreading Generalised Writing: from Foucault to Speculative…
Studying sixteenth-century France from inside and outside France
My guest edited special issue of Nottingham French Studies (NFS), explores ‘Text, Knowledge and Wonder in Early Modern France‘, fleshing out new aspects of the sense of wonder that permeates much literature, philosophy, culture, and ritual in the period. As Genevieve…
Rediscovering the Wonder of Philosophy
Wonder is largely absent as a topic of concern to contemporary philosophers. Yet ancient philosophers saw it as the source of what was distinctive in their way of thinking. Plato and Aristotle thought that it was the stirrings of wonder…
Q&A with Stephen Bowman, Author of The Pilgrims Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895–1945
Tell us a bit about The Pilgrims Society and Public Diplomacy, 1895–1945 My book is about the Pilgrims Society, which is an elite dining club that was founded in London in 1902 and in New York in 1903. Not many…
Warwick Ball on the cultural diversity of Afghanistan
It is a pleasure to see the launch of the first issue of Afghanistan, a journal to showcase the country’s exceptional cultural diversity. It is the first scholarly journal devoted to the country since the demise of Afghan Studies in…
Utopia: A round-table discussion
Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’, a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. The term was first published in 1516, and became the short title of his book about an…