British

John Lilburne, footwear, fame, and radical history

By Ted Vallance
Forrest Gump’s momma famously told him that you could tell a lot about a person from their shoes. Footwear features prominently in two images of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, with both the seventeenth- and the nineteenth-century prints depicting Lilburne wearing striking leather boots [link to article]. The Sunderland museum also holds a pair of boots once said to have belonged to Lilburne, though these appear to be of a rather plainer design than those that were so lovingly rendered in his 1649 trial portrait.

On taste and morality: from William Hogarth to Grayson Perry

By Helen Berry
The artist Grayson Perry recently completed a cycle of six giant tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences, inspired by William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. In the Turner Prizewinner’s modern rendition, Tim Rakewell (like his Georgian counterpart Tom Rakewell) undergoes a social transformation from humble origins to landed gentry. In Perry’s version, Tim’s life course is transformed by university education and a self-made fortune in computers – which catapults him socially from his humble origins in a Northern council house, via the bourgeois confines of middle-class dinner tables, to owning his own country estate.

Is America an empire?

By Timothy H. Parsons
The intense controversy that this question engenders is remarkable. On the left, critics of assertive American foreign, military, and economic policies depict these policies as aggressively immoral by branding them “imperial.” On the right, advocates for an even more forceful application of American “hard power,” such as Niall Ferguson and the other members of his self-described “neo-imperialist gang,” argue that the United States should use its immense wealth and military might to impose order and stability on an increasingly chaotic world.

Jericho: The community at the heart of Oxford University Press

By Martin Maw

We’re delighted to announce that the Oxford University Press Museum, based at OUP’s Oxford publishing office, reopens today following extensive refurbishment. Archivist Martin Maw celebrates the occasion by taking a look at the historic links between OUP and Jericho, the local area.

Did we really want a National Health Service?

By Nick Hayes
For most today, it’s difficult to imagine a British hospital system where treatment is not ‘free’ at the point of delivery, paid for out of national taxation, because in our imagination, the alternatives conjure pejorative images of the Americanisation of health. Those today opposed to decentralisation also echo the concerns of earlier health reformers like Dr Stark Murray, who thought the pre-nationalised hospital system simply disparate and chaotic.

The Demise of the Toff

By William Doyle
Born to tenants of a country squire in Yorkshire, I knew about what my grandmother called ‘toffs’ at an early age. The squire was a toff. As a child I scarcely realised that the squire and his lifestyle were already relics of a fast-disappearing pattern of society.

15 August 1040: Macbeth kills King Duncan I of Scotland

By Daniel Swift
Susan Sontag wrote that having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a piece of the True Cross. We don’t have a photograph, of course, and even the portraits that we do have are unreliable, but in his plays he left snapshots of a different kind.

London’s Burning!

Today we are celebrating the UK publication of The Day Parliament Burned Down, in which the dramatic story of the nineteenth century national catastrophe is told for the first time. In this blog post, author Caroline Shenton presents the top ten London fires that have changed the face of the capital city.

Making prisoners work: from hulks to helping victims

By Susan Easton and Christine Piper
In July 2012, two prisoners lost their application for judicial review of two Prison Service Instructions which implement the Prisoners’ Earnings Act 1996. This Act demands that a deduction of up to 40% from the wages of prisoners in open prisons is imposed.

An ODNB guide to the people of the London 2012 opening ceremony

By Philip Carter
Where do you stand on Friday’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games? Delighted, inspired, a little bit baffled? There’s a possibility, we realize, that not all of the show’s 1 billion-strong audience will have caught every reference. So here’s the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography guide to some of those who made it possible.

Rosalind Franklin: the not-so-dark lady of DNA

By Jenifer Glynn
If Rosalind Franklin had lived, she would have been 92 today. But she died at 37, five years after the discovery of the structure of DNA had been announced by Watson and Crick. As Crick confessed later (but never confessed to her), “the data which really helped us to obtain the structure was mainly obtained by Rosalind Franklin”.

Was Elizabeth I Richard II?

The Kent Archives have a cache of Dering letters — begging letters, affectionate letters, letters full of gossip and news. One of them came with an enclosure that caught my attention: it was the handwritten transcript of a conversation, almost a playlet. It rang bells; I remembered reading it years back, although most of the details were beyond recall. The document recorded an encounter between Queen Elizabeth I and William Lambarde, a legal theorist and pioneering antiquarian

Titanic: One Family’s Story

By John Welshman
At the time of the collision, Hanna Touma was standing in the doorway of the family’s cabin. She was talking to one of the other migrants from her village. It was just a jolt, but it made the door slam shut, cutting her index finger. Two of the men went to find out what had happened while Hanna went to the Infirmary to get her hand bandaged. Everyone she passed wondered what had caused the jolt and why the ship had stopped.

Friday 13 July: Unlucky for some Conservative ministers

By Gill Bennett
On Friday, 13 July 1962, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Lord Chancellor, the Ministers of Education, Defence, Housing and Local Government, and the Ministers for Scotland and without Portfolio all lost their jobs in an episode that became known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. This dramatic phrase, most frequently used to describe Hitler’s bloody purge at the end of June 1934 of the leadership of the Sturmabteilung (his paramilitary Brownshirts), has since become political shorthand for any ruthless political manoeuvres and unexpectedly brutal reshuffles.

Alan Turing, Code-Breaker

By Jack Copeland
Germany’s Army, Air Force, and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during the Second World War. These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war, such as weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships. Thanks to Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands — sometimes within an hour or two of its being transmitted.

10 facts and conjectures about Edmund Spenser

By Andrew Hadfield
A particular anxiety/curiosity of any author who undertakes a work of biography is whether they have discovered anything new about their subject. I’m not sure that I have any ‘smoking gun’ for Edmund Spenser (1554?-1599) that conclusively proves something that no one knew before, and there is no one single archival discovery that can be trumpeted as a particular triumph. But I think I have rearranged and rethought Spenser’s life and its relationship to his work in some new ways. Here is a list of my top ten favourite Spenser facts and conjectures, some known, some less well known.