I was raised in Norwich, a situation which results in a mixture of thwarted pride – it isn’t as backward as all that – and self-deprecating irony – as above. What then, to make of the footnote in E.P. Thompson’s seminal article ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’? Thompson identifies […]

Read more "The Battle of Ham Run"

Two things that happened to me the same day have got me thinking about progress and authenticity again. The first was that I went to a great seminar, where one of my colleagues from the IHR, Courtney Campbell (http://www.history.ac.uk/about/courtney-campbell and find her on Twitter: @CJCampbell123) was talking about the ideas of modernizing the nation and […]

Read more "Premature Regret"

We are weary of manifestoes. This isn’t another rant about how pointless and depressing the General Election in the UK is: I’ll leave that to people better qualified and less disillusioned. No, this has been prompted by a piece in the New York Times which has been popping up on social media a lot recently. […]

Read more "The Real Conference Crisis"