Archive for Articles General

“In 1964, three British women stepped into the role of ‘civil defence volunteers’ and entered a model shelter next to the Guildhall in York. They spent 24 hours in their miserable hollow, listening to simulated regional broadcasts beamed in from a van outside. They slept for a few hours in a specially sandbagged ‘core’ area intended to protect them against fallout, cooked a meal on a primus stove and swallowed aspirins for their headaches. After a single day they were plainly demoralised. As the Times wrote of the widely reported exercise, ‘even that basic feminine impulse to make frequent cups of tea deserted them. . .’”

Prompted by the idea of ‘rehearsal’ presented in Tracy C. Davis’ book, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Duke 2007), I suggest a wider account of how theatrical techniques have emerged from the playhouse to shape public life and the political sphere.

‘What perspectives do the British bring to bear when they think of China? And how much of that distant land, once known as legendary Cathay, do they actually see, beyond their own prejudices…?’

This is the long-forgotten article in which the iron curtain was first taken from the theatre and converted into a political metaphor. It was published in the London-based Suffragist magazine Jus Suffragii, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1 January 1915, p. 218. I count it among the key writings of the First World War. It can also be read - against Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and other latter-day polemicists - as an example of how secular-minded and even atheist writers may engage religious subjects without merely resorting to furious denial. An account of Vernon Lee and her article’s sources, context and influence is given in my book Iron Curtain: from stage to Cold War.

A letter published in the Times Literary Supplement.

Over the years many people have tried to list the essential characteristics of Englishness, but what about the sense of threat and danger that so often serves to frame such lists? I wrote this article for Made in England, a website based on a collaboration between the BBC and Arts Council England and launched on 23 April 2008

‘First published in 1943, The World of Yesterday could scarcely be less like the popular confessional autobiographies of our time, which tend to be soft-centred victimologies in which the self is presented as an innocent, child-like entity, while history comes across as a form of abuse…’

An article from Guardian Review, 2 February, 2008.

‘Television producers sometimes speak of the ‘golden hour’ – that time in the late afternoon, when the sinking sun casts even routine landscapes into brilliant relief. But the early twentieth century photographers who interest Hauser had a different interest in such tricks of the light…’

About Kitty Hauser’s book Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology & the British Landscape 1927-1955, Oxford University Press, £65. This is the ‘pre-print version of a review published in the journal Twentieth Century British History.

Nowadays, the Polish-British artist and illustrator Andrzej Krauze is well known across Europe for his drawings in the Guardian (London), Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw), Courrier International (Paris), Internazionale (Rome), and many other publications. None of this could necessarily be foreseen when he came to London in the early eighties, a time when he was largely known for drawings made in the service of the cultural opposition in Poland. I got to know him shortly after his arrival… An article prompted by the approach of a new exhibition entitled ‘A Serious Game’: 100 Drawings by Andrzej Krauze, 19 November 2007-15 February 2008, The Gallery, University College for the Creative Arts, Ashley Road, Epsom KT18 5BE.

‘Winston Churchill took credit for it in 1946, but the phrase ‘iron curtain’ was first adapted from the stage by a pacifist and feminist in 1914.’ Published in the Guardian Review on 3 November 2007, this article describes how the iron curtain was taken from the theatre and converted into a political metaphor by Vernon Lee and others in the early twentieth century.

A review of Margaret Macmillan’s Seize the Hour: when Nixon Met Mao. Published in the London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 16, 16 August 2007, pp. 19-20.