Britain's Wartime Research Articles

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

Rose Macaulay and Propaganda

The novelist Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) had direct professional experience of Britain's secret propaganda operation during the First World War. She was among the first British novelists to take propaganda seriously as a subject for fiction, and wrote insightfully about its methods and its social implications. Moreover, her long career illuminates both the continuity and the development of the British state's clandestine efforts to shape public opinion at home and abroad, from the beginnings of systematic, state-directed propaganda in the First World War to the more diffuse strategies of early Cold War anti-communism. Despite her close connections to propaganda in both world wars, however – and notwithstanding the interest her fiction very frequently takes in the worlds of official information, disinformation, and espionage – Macaulay has hardly figured in recent scholarship on the links between literature and national information systems. This article argues that Macaulay approached the challenge of reconciling propaganda and literature differently from many of her modernist contemporaries, refusing to abandon the idea of fiction as a persuasive and socially-engaged form of imaginative writing. If this position made her an outlier in the climate of reaction against propaganda which followed the First World War, it would, by the early years of the Cold War, seem much more tenable. In its first half, the article establishes Macaulay's bona fides as a participant in Britain's wartime propaganda establishment, and describes the impression this experience left on her early fiction. It then turns to Macaulay's final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, in which religious propaganda and anti-communist rhetoric combine, to great comic effect, in the febrile atmosphere of the Cold War middle east.

Red Joan

Red Joan John Ordway Red Joan 2018 Directed by Trevor Nunn Distributed by Embankment Films https://www.embankmentfilms.com/portfolio_page/red-joan/ 100 minutes A grandmotherly British woman prunes the plants in her garden and then steps back into her tidy semi-detached home—thinking, perhaps, of a cup of tea. She glances at a newspaper on the table, a headline of which announces the death of Sir William Mitchell, a man her age and the former head of the Foreign Office. There is a knock on the door, and a look of anxiety flits across her face. She composes herself, answers the door, and the reason for her fleeting look of terror becomes clear: The doorstep is lined with police officers, who place her under arrest for espionage and lead her to an unmarked car waiting at the curb. These opening scenes set the tone for Red Joan, a film based on Jennie Rooney's 2013 novel that was, in turn, based on the true story of Melita Norwood. It is a film about spies and spying, secrets and betrayals, but not, in any sense of the word, a "spy movie." It is a character study of Joan Stanley—a subtle, nuanced portrait slowly built up from multiple layers of carefully observed detail—and the scenes of 1940s era espionage "tradecraft," though surprisingly numerous and frequently suspenseful, are there to reveal her character, rather than to advance the plot. The "atomic secrets" that Joan, a minor player in Britain's wartime nuclear-bomb research program, funnels to the Soviet Union during and just after World War II are a McGuffin in the classic Hitchcockian sense. It doesn't matter what they are, only that everyone wants them. Red Joan exists in two eras simultaneously: the present, where Joan (played by Judi Dench) is interviewed by a pair of coolly-professional police detectives and interacts with her adult son, a respected barrister; and the past, where Joan (played by Sophie Cookson) goes from a naïve first-year natural-sciences student at Cambridge to a terrified-but-effective Soviet asset. As in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2018), the two stories unfold at different speeds. The "present" events unfold in less than a week of what appears to be 1999 or 2000, the "past" events in slightly more than a decade: from 1938 to 1949. Judi Dench's screen time is nowhere near as great as the advertising for Red Joan implies—the ratio of "past" to "present" scenes is on the order of 70-30—but it is, nonetheless, Dench's film. In her time on screen she plays out a complete character arc, relying (because her lines are, by design, bland and muted) almost entirely on posture, facial expression, and tone of voice. Sophie Cookson, in the flashback scenes, seems at first to be simply be the "naïve young woman who learns painful lessons," but it gradually becomes clear that she is up to something more complex. She shows us Joan—an awkward, naïve, provincial teenager in her first scenes—evolving not just into a strong, confident woman, but into the specific strong, confident woman that Judi Dench is playing. Like Dench, Cookson relies on subtle acting rather than the deliberately low-key dialogue to establish her character, but—unlike Dench—she receives bravura assistance from the film's hairstylists and costume designers, who change her look to subtly underscore her changing personality. Young Joan is neatly but blandly dressed in her prewar scenes at Cambridge, where she stands out because many of her friends are sleekly, flamboyantly stylish. She begins to develop a sense of style during the war years (trading her shapeless knit cap for wide-brimmed hats, for example), and the effect is accentuated because—thanks to rationing and the fact that she works among scientists—everyone around her is a bit dowdy. In her final scenes, revealing new levels of resolve (and ruthlessness) as she blackmails an old Cambridge friend into helping her and her lover flee England, she looks the second coming of Barbara Stanwyck—a perfect reflection of who her character is becoming. [End Page 40] It is central to the...

‘On the Oliphant Deign, Now to Sound the Blast’: How Mark Oliphant Secretly Warned of America’s Post-war Intentions of an Atomic Monopoly

In 1943, Mark Oliphant arrived on the Manhattan Project as a leading member of the British mission. Inside the laboratory he was a measured and skilful physicist, but outside he was a bull that charged headlong into the gates of secrecy and the unholy communion of science, politics and military. General Leslie Groves was the abrasive and practical military man in charge of the Manhattan Project and he rarely let his guard down. But in 1944, Oliphant and Ernest Lawrence challenged him on secrecy, and the usually circumspect Groves became agitated at the naivety of the self-absorbed scientists and provided an insight on America's secret post-war intentions of an atomic monopoly. Oliphant, not a man to let explosive knowledge pass him by, headed to the British Embassy inWashington to send a secure report to London that escalated all the way to the top of Britain's war time leadership. In this moment, Oliphant was sounding a horn to warn that Britain's own atomic ambitions and scientific freedoms were under imminent threat.

Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815 by Susan Valladares

Reviewed by: Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815 by Susan Valladares Dana Van Kooy (bio) Susan Valladares. Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xii + 459. $148.00. In 1994, Julie Carlson was among a handful of academics to invite fellow romanticists In [to] the Theatre of Romanticism. While the theatre these scholars portrayed was expansive, it was by no means measureless. Perhaps the 1813 London theatrical sensation, Remorse was not familiar to many readers at the time, but Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Byron certainly were, and Carlson's ambitious engagement with period performances depicting women and nationalism brought to light the false binaries that structure oppressive domestic—familial and national—relationships. Coleridge also features prominently in Susan Valladares's Staging the Peninsular War: English Theatres 1807–1815, where, distinctly, the English national theatre is no longer viewed as a singular entity, but rather as multiple venues and a plurality of inter-theatrical performances. Tightening her historical timeframe, Valladares considers the cultural impact of Britain's popular, albeit unexpected, Anglo-Spanish alliance during this period and specifically how it shaped early modern celebrity culture, wartime theatre, and the performance repertoires in London and Bristol. She also explains how the alliance transformed and valorized the stage Irishman due to the active [End Page 122] role of Irish soldiers, and especially Arthur Wellesley (Lord Wellington), in the Peninsular War. More specifically, she offers readers four erudite chapters, considering Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro (1799), the shifting political role of Shakespeare in the repertoire, the topical repertoire of London's minor, non-patent-holding theatres, and the important and distinctly different cultural role played by provincial theatres like those in Bristol, which hosted a military garrison of soldiers deployed to fight Napoleon's French forces in Portugal and Spain. The second half of Valladares's book is quite unusual. It represents the work of a detail-minded researcher who realized the gaps in information available about the nineteenth-century theatre and created a calendar of plays for Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and the British Theatre Royal from 1807 to 1815. As she notes in her introduction, the purpose of these appendices is to encourage new research and the "many other compelling narratives" (214) that remain to be told about Britain's wartime theatres. Valladares begins her study of English theatres with a chapter about Sheridan's five-act tragedy, a spectacular success by all accounts that initially featured a star-studded cast, including John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, William Barrymore, and Dorothy Jordan. The 1799 play extended the season, holding the stage for thirty-one nights, an initial run that culminated in a command performance for George III in early June. As Valladares indicates, the first chapter, "Pizarro, 'Political Proteus'" investigates why and how Sheridan's drama "about the Spanish conquest of Peru became one of the defining narratives of early nineteenth-century Britain" (15). Pizarro entered the repertoire immediately and remained a favorite at Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and across the provincial patent theatres throughout the mid-nineteenth century. As Valladares's chapter title—a phrase taken from William Cobbett—suggests, Pizarro's plot proved protean in its adaptability to the complex of "performative, social and political relations" (19) that English audiences negotiated as England changed its political stance toward Spain and Portugal throughout the Peninsular War. Grounding her argument in a range of source material, including periodicals, newspaper and journal reviews, playbills, and literary anecdotes, Valladares traces how Sheridan's drama reflected England's changing ideological stance. She argues that the initial reception of Pizarro focused on patriotism, which led to King George III stealing the show, but not without some attempts on the part of well-recognized radicals—notably, John Horne Tooke and William Wilberforce—to redirect its cultural significance. With the declaration of the Peace of Amiens and its collapse in May of 1803, and growing public fear about an imminent French invasion amidst concerns about Sheridan's association with Irish radicalism, the question of patriotism took a darker turn, revealing the performance's sometimes alarming ability, noted by Cobbett in his 1804 review, to conflate and deconstruct oppositional [End Page 123...

Waste into weapons: recycling in Britain during the Second World War

During the Second World War, the United Kingdom faced severe shortages of essential raw materials. To keep its armaments factories running, the British government enlisted millions of people in efforts to recycle a wide range of materials for use in munitions production. Recycling not only supplied British munitions factories with much-needed raw materials - it also played a key role in the efforts of the British government to maintain the morale of its citizens, to secure billions of dollars in Lend-Lease aid from the United States, and to uncover foreign intelligence. However, Britain's wartime recycling campaign came at a cost: it consumed items that would never have been destroyed under normal circumstances, including significant parts of the nation's cultural heritage. Based on extensive archival research, Peter Thorsheim examines the relationship between armaments production, civil liberties, cultural preservation, and diplomacy, making Waste into Weapons the first in-depth history of twentieth-century recycling in Britain.

Fighting and Talking

Lord Louis Mountbatten defied the tension between military and political leadership, becoming one of the most trusted senior naval officers and statesmen in the fading British Empire. He undoubtedly played a central role in Britain's wartime efforts in South and Southeast Asia, but he is better known today for his somewhat controversial role overseeing Indian partition and independence. Throughout, it was chiefly his political realism, and that of his lieutenants, that enabled Britain to maintain its influence in the region for several decades to come.

Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads, by Fraser J. Harbutt

This book is impressive, provocative and also (I have to declare) not a little exasperating. Let me say something about each. To begin with, it must be said that Fraser Harbutt has unquestionably produced an impressive work of original scholarship which takes issue with the mainstream narratives about the origins of the Cold War which have dominated the last two decades. Yalta 1945 is both a powerful challenge to the doyen of US Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, and many others (for example Melvyn Leffler) who have produced important and influential studies. Just as many of us have set exam questions asking ‘who or what was responsible for the Cold War?’; Harbutt poses the same question—and comes up with a provocative and challenging thesis. While Gaddis has been clear that ultimate blame lay with the devious, mendacious, manipulative dictator in the Kremlin with whom it was (in Gaddis's judgement) ultimately impossible to deal, Harbutt disagrees. Of course, he argues, Stalin was at least in part responsible for what occurred in Europe, but the main burden of culpability must rest with Britain, and principally with Britain's war-time Prime Minister. If there is a villain of Harbutt's book, it is Winston Churchill. In a nutshell, Britain, with its old modes of diplomacy, its imperialist heritage and (for Harbutt) delusions of grandeur, must shoulder the responsibility for the division of Europe, the fate of the Poles and the missed opportunities of Yalta. It was Britain which attempted during the war years to create a settlement with Stalin, dispensing liberally with the fate of whole nations and peoples. Nowhere, Harbutt argues, was this more obvious—or indeed more odious—than in the so-called ‘Percentages agreement’ of 1944. Here Churchill infamously ‘accepted’ a Soviet sphere of influence in East and Central Europe in return for British influence in Greece. In pursuit of continued co-operation with Stalin, not only were the British prepared to accept a division of the Continent but they looked the other way as the brave Poles were slaughtered and their country dismembered. In doing so, the British were attempting to keep Stalin ‘on side’, as they tried to maintain their empire through (especially) control of the Mediterranean.

The Dawn of the Jet Age in Austerity Britain: David Lean's The Sound Barrier (1952)

Every self-respecting country house in the past century housed a cinema. In the early 1950s, the Prime Minister had a choice of venues in which to view his favourite films—on home territory at Char...

Arms, Economics, and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (review)

Reviewed by: Arms, Economics, and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs David Zimmerman (bio) Arms, Economics, and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs. By G. C. Peden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii+384. $99. By trying to link developments in British military technology to economics and strategy between World War I and the height of the cold war, G. C. Peden has attempted a hugely ambitious task. Peden is quite correct in pointing out that Britain remained one of the world's great powers and leading innovators until the rising costs of new weapons systems and the relative decline in the country's economy caused its eclipse in the late 1960s. Though not without its shortcomings, Peden's is a laudable effort. Its great strength is that it puts strategic- and weapons-system acquisition into proper economic context. His account of the relationship of finance to World War II industrial production is the most succinct available, and he deftly deals with the ongoing controversy over Correlli Barnett's harsh critique of Britain's industrial performance. Britain's intent to equip only a fifty-five-division army, explains Peden, meant that it did not need to produce as many tanks as Germany required for its much larger army. Similarly first-rate is Peden's description of Britain's ultimately doomed struggle to keep pace with sophisticated and costly weapons-system development during the cold war. It was the ever-increasing expense of new weapons, as much as Britain's relative decline, that forced the nation to cede its position as a great power. Perhaps nothing is more difficult in writing the history of military technology than tracing the course of a weapon's development from the decision to pursue research to the eventual deployment in combat. Weapons-system acquisition involves complex and ever-changing factors, including military tactical doctrine, strategic threat analysis, interservice rivalries, politics, finance, industrial capacity and capability, and technological and scientific research and development. To attempt an all-encompassing study [End Page 738] such as this is very brave indeed, and an author must be careful not to oversimplify the technological complexities of weapons systems. Unfortunately, Peden's book has a large number of errors, for instance in the account of First and Second World War antisubmarine warfare technology. While correctly pointing out that convoys were the single most important factor in defeating U-boats in 1917–18, Peden gives far too much credit to the development of hydrophones and makes no mention of the invention of active sonar by French scientists. Hydrophones on the whole did not work. Despite the deployment of some 10,000 of these devices, ship-borne hydrophone detection played a role in the sinking of only three or four German submarines. Peden does not cite Willem Hackmann's history of the development of sonar, implying that radio intelligence during World War II consisted primarily of enigma intercepts. But David Syrett has conclusively argued that strategic and tactical high-frequency direction-finding were far more important than decryption in redirecting convoys around submarine patrol lines. Surprisingly, several major themes of Britain's wartime industrial mobilization are not fully explored. Quite correctly, Peden explains that the dominions provided little assistance in the rearmament program of the 1930s. In addressing World War II, however, he makes little mention of the industrial and financial contributions made by Canada, Australia, and other components of the empire, and he does not mention the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, perhaps one of the best examples of successful imperial planning for a long war. Shortcomings in design and industrial-production techniques caused numerous problems in weapons development and manufacturing in the United Kingdom, and in transferring these for overseas production. Peden argues that such issues were no worse than in Germany, but it would be hard to find a German equivalent to the scandalously inferior British tank designs. While this book is not perfect, it is still a very useful study on a very important topic. There is little doubt that Britain's decline as a great power is one of the most important developments of the twentieth century. Peden greatly contributes to our understanding of...

Re-Thinking the History of Blame: Britain and Minorities during the Second World War

Since the end of the Cold War, a range of historical studies have focused on the importance of liberal self-identity in the British wartime imagination. Bitter debates have taken place between Second World War scholars over the extent to which this liberal self-image reflected an historical reality. In particular, historians have argued about Britain's response to and attitude towards the Holocaust; as some scholars have grown tired of what they perceive is a tendency among their colleagues to attack Britain's war role and lay blame without justification. This article offers a new analysis of Britain's wartime policy towards minorities in the context of these ongoing historical debates about liberal self-image and Holocaust culpability. By examining British governmental attitudes towards black war volunteers and soldiers and Jewish refugees from Nazism, it contends that the idea of Britain as a liberal world power is simplistic and problematic. In this analysis, British policies on internment and Jews and blacks in the military are explored in detail. Ultimately, the article argues that high levels of ‘racial’ thinking in the British government often led to ungenerous and fundamentally illiberal responses towards immigrants and minorities.

Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (review)

Reviewed by: Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain Lisa M. Budreau Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain. By Janet S. K. Watson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83153-9. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 333. $70.00. Another book on Britain and Great War memory? No, not quite. This revisionist work represents the latest in the Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series under the editorial leadership of memory historian Jay Winter. In her somewhat provocative study, Janet Watson uses an exhaustive supply of published and unpublished texts (diaries, letters, poetry, public and private narratives) to challenge numerous claims concerning the war experience. Most significantly, she suggests that the disillusionment connected with the First World War was a postwar phenomenon, one gradually produced through the publication and popularity of memoirs and novels after the Armistice. "The war itself was overwhelmingly popular, and the nation came together to a remarkable degree [End Page 584] despite critical differences that reflected the nature of divisions in English society," she suggests (p. 2). This controversial stance is supported by an innovative two-part approach in which the author considers her evidence of wartime accounts as a lived experience separately in the first section, then examines retrospective accounts and postwar writings in the second half. Though primarily a study of gender and class dynamics, the analysis is comparative in several key ways. Watson looks at both women and men side by side, with special attention paid to families where both brothers and sisters were active in the war effort. Then, she examines two groups who brought different attitudes to wartime efforts: those who viewed participation as work and those who saw it as service. People brought a wide variety of attitudes to their efforts during wartime as the meaning of patriotism was constantly redefined. For example, professional soldiers and trained nurses, while patriotic, saw their efforts as work with a view toward career advancement. Munitions workers, by contrast, saw an opportunity for better wages and working conditions. For some, theirs was a job that had to be done while others believed king, honor, and glory were their supreme duty. Perceptions of class position played a crucial role in the way different types of war work were viewed, according to Watson. These views, in turn, were grounded in convictions about the preservation of social order in Britain's wartime class society. Interestingly, Watson concludes that people who had seen their wartime participation in terms of service were most likely to remember it as a story of disillusionment. Some aspects of Watson's argument are bound to provoke. She states, for example, "Without diminishing the terrors of trench bombardment or the total horrifics of mass advance into direct machine gun fire (though this was not fortunately, a frequent occurrence), we must acknowledge and give credence to other portrayals of the war experience which are not uniformly negative" (p. 50). Granted, most conventional histories begin with idealistic volunteers and end with shattered veterans and names on memorials. But, what about perspectives during the war? The author asks us to consider where the shift occurred from valuable contribution of soldiers during the war years toward the attitude of useless sacrifice? Without minimizing the considerable effort that has gone into this study, perhaps the book's greatest contribution to First World War scholarship is its ability to bring such questions of memory to the forefront of traditional military history enquiry. All credit to a work that is freshly researched and can genuinely be said to contribute so significantly to the field. Similarly, I applaud the Journal for its range and diversity by eliciting this new and distinctive historiographical genre for review. Lisa M. Budreau St. Antony’s College, Oxford University Oxford, United Kingdom Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

Introduction: Special Operations Executive – New Approaches and Perspectives

Readers of this journal might ask why there is a need to dedicate an entire issue to the study of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organization famously tasked by Churchill to ‘set Europ...

Colossus: its origins and originators

The British Colossus computer was one of the most important tools in the wartime effort to break German codes. Based on interviews and on recently declassified documents, this article clarifies the roles played by Thomas Flowers, Alan Turing, William Tutte, and Max Newman in the events leading to the installation of the first Colossus at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime code-breaking establishment, in December 1943.

Subverting rules and reinforcing stereotypes: Italianness in Madonna of the Seven Moons

This article focuses on a key Gainsborough costume melodrama, Madonna of the Seven Moons (1944). Following the critical revaluation of the ‘woman's film’, feminist film scholars have celebrated Madonna's feminine aesthetics and extravagant Italian setting, seen as an alternative to the austerity of Britain's wartime self‐definition. Using this position as a point of debate, I explore some hitherto ignored implications of the film's representation of Italianness, arguing that Madonna actually reinforces national boundaries by relying on long‐established notions of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Italianness’, and owes its box‐office success to the validation of Italy's ambivalent place in British fantasy.

Claire A. Culleton, Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 240 pp. $55.00 cloth

Claire Culleton's study of working-class women in First World War Britain is an ambitious project that aims at a “comprehensive analysis of the complexities that conspired to link women's lives, their work, and their writings” (8). The book is positioned as a study that redresses what Culleton views as the marginalization of working-class women's experience in historical and literary studies of the period. She attempts, therefore, to write a history “from below” that provides both historical analysis of the experience of working-class women who labored in Britain's wartime industries, and an analysis of their culture, as revealed through the 1970s oral history testimonies of the Imperial War Museum and the literature they produced for factory newspapers. She states that she will tie this experience and its “costs” to changes in British society that “no longer permit[ed] sentimentality of hearth and home ( . . . )” (2). Culleton notes that the book is aimed at specialists on the subject and general readers. The analysis presented in the book, however, falls short of the author's stated goals and adds little to the existing scholarship on working-class women in First World War Britain.

‘Alien Diplomatist’: Antisemitism and Anti‐Germanism in the Diplomatic Career of Sir Francis Oppenheimer

AbstractThis article examines the interaction of antisemitic sentiments, bred by social exclusivity, and the conduct of diplomacy through the prism of the career of Sir Francis Oppenheimer, one of the few Jews in Britain's foreign service in the early part of the twentieth century. Oppenheimer filled consular and diplomatic posts between 1900 and 1920. Despite his distinguished services, his brilliant analyses of pre‐1914 German economics and politics, and his key role in Britain's wartime blockade efforts against the Central Powers, Oppenheimer found himself hampered in the execution of his duties, and thwarted in his hopes for advancement, by latent antisemitism amongst the senior ranks of Britain's diplomatic establishment. During the war years, the combination of such sentiments, the xenophobia of the super‐patriotic press, and Whitehall turf‐wars proved irresistible, bringing Oppenheimer's career to an early end.

Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin

Challenging assumptions about the separation of high politics and everyday life, this book uncovers the important influence of the broad civilian populace, particularly poorer women, on German domestic and even military policy during World War I. As Britain's wartime blockade of goods to Central Europe increasingly squeezed the German food supply, public protests led by women of little means broke out in the streets of Berlin and other German cities. These street scenes riveted public attention and drew urban populations together across class lines to make formidable, apparently unified demands on the German state. Imperial authorities responded in unprecedented fashion in the interests of beleaguered consumers, interceding actively in food distribution and production. But offcials' actions were much more effective in legitimating popular demands than in defending the state's right to rule. In the end, argues Davis, this dynamic fundamentally reformulated relations between state and society and contributed to the state's downfall in 1918.

The Cambridge Quintet: A Work of Scientific Speculation

From the Publisher: Imagine, if you will, one stormy summer evening in 1949, as novelist and scientist C. P. Snow, Britain's distinguished wartime science advisor and author of The Two Cultures, invites four singular guests to a sumptuous seven-course dinner at his alma mater, Christ's College, Cambridge, to discuss one of the emerging scientific issues of the day: Can we build a machine that could duplicate human cognitive processes? The distinguished guest list for Snow's dinner consists of physicist Erwin Schrodinger, inventor of wave mechanics; Ludwig Wittgenstein, the famous twentieth-century philosopher of language, who posited two completely contradictory theories of human thought in his lifetime; population geneticist/science popularizer J. B. S. Haldane; and Alan Turing, the mathematician/codebreaker who formulated the computing scheme that foreshadowed the logical structure of all modern computers. Capturing not only their unique personalities but also their particular stands on this fascinating issue, Casti dramatically shows what each of these great men might have argued about artificial intelligence, had they actually gathered for dinner that midsummer evening.

“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963

It has been more than a decade since Benedict Anderson urged us to consider the nation a particular kind of cultural artefact and to study national communities in terms of the style in which they are imagined. Anticipating Anderson's seminal work, Enoch Powell, the Biblical scholar, Ulster Unionist M.P., and 1960s advocate of the voluntary repatriation of people of color in Britain likewise suggested that the “life of nations … is lived largely in the imagination.” He also noted that the myths on which Britain's “corporate imagination” rested had, since 1945, become severely impoverished. Amidst the rubble produced by the collapse of many of those myths scholars have begun to problematize the various components of national identity that, customarily, have been taken for granted as “real” rather than invented. They have also begun to trace the manner by which the national community has constantly been imagined and reimagined in the past. Some of their more insightful work has considered the articulation of Englishness against other nationalities in the United Kingdom, particularly the Irish. This had led Linda Colley to suggest that national identity is always contingent and relational, the product of boundaries drawn up to distinguish between the collective self and the other.In this essay, I want to suggest that Britain's wartime sense of national unity, generated through the struggle against fascist Germany, began to crumble after 1945. This gradual erosion of national cohesion, coupled with Britain's failure to generate new narratives of national purpose through the rhetoric of the Cold War, led to a veritable crisis of national self-representation in the 1950s, a crisis compounded by domestic social dislocation and the rapid emergence of the political, military, and economic hegemony of the United States.