Winner of the Jewish Chronicle Harold H. Wingate Literary Award. Rothschild Buildings were typical of the "model dwellings for the working classes" which were such an important part of the response to late-Victorian London's housing problem. They were built for poor but respectable Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the community which put down roots there was to be characteristic of the East End Jewish working class in its formative years. By talking to people who grew up in the Buildings in the 1890s and after, and using untapped documentary evidence from a wide range of public and...

Most studies of the British working-class experience deal with labor aristocrats and the "respectable poor." Campbell Bunk gives the first full account of a "rough," sub-proletarian community and the forces which molded, changed, and eventually destroyed it. From the 1880s to World War II, Campbell Road, Finsbury Park (known as Campbell Bunk), had a notorious reputation for violence, for breeding thieves and prostitutes, and for an enthusiastic disregard for law and order. It was the object of reform by church, magistrates, local authorities, and social scientists, who left many traces of...

Often overlooked and overshadowed by its North American cousin, Canadian cinema has nevertheless produced some mesmerising films and directors, including Atom Egoyan, Robert Lepage and Denys Arcand. The Cinema of Canada contains 24 essays, each on a different film and divides itself into three distinct categories: English-Canadian cinema; Quebec cinema; Aboriginal cinema. In so doing, it provides a fascinating historical account of the development of film and documentary traditions across the diverse national and regional communities in Canada. Among the many important films discussed...

A Guardian Best Book of the Year 2014. 11pm, Tuesday August 4, 1914: with the declaration of war, London becomes one of the greatest killing machines in human history. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through the capital on their way to the front; wounded men are brought back to be treated in London's hospitals; and millions of shells are produced in its factories. The war changes London life forever. Women escape the drudgery of domestic service to work as munitionettes. Full employment puts money into the pockets of the London poor for the first time. Self-appointed moral...