Most studies of the interwar years have focused upon literary elites, rendering the period and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognize how much ideas of national identity were bound up with notions of femininity and private life. Boldly moving across the culture, from the highbrow novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett to the detective fiction of Agatha Christie, the author traces the making of a conservative national temperament...
Most studies of the interwar years have focused upon literary elites, rendering the period and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In For...
"Family history begins with missing persons," Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we never knew, about the long skein that led to us, and to here, and to now. So we start exploring. Most of us, however, give up a few generations back. We run into a gap, get embarrassed by a ne'er-do-well, or simply find our ancestors are less glamorous than we'd hoped. That didn't stop Alison Light: in the last weeks of her father's life, she embarked on an attempt to trace the history of her family as far back as she could reasonably go. The result is...
"Family history begins with missing persons," Alison Light writes in Common People. We wonder about those we've lost, and those we never knew, ...