British Actors Research Articles

Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900: The Changing Enemy by Oliver S. Buckton, Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner

Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900: The Changing Enemy by Oliver S. Buckton, Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner

It is the only way

I’d like to share a powerful quote with you: You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.” It is by British activist and leader of the British suffragist movement Emmeline Pankhurst. I came across it in the past couple of weeks as the U.K. celebrated 100 years since its Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act 1918, which gave all men over 21 and all women over 30 the right to vote. Now if you, like me, are left wondering about the differential in minimum voting age, you will be interested to hear that the reason for this was to prevent men from becoming minority voters

Boleslavsky – Stanislavsky: who was first? The development of the Stanislavsky System in the American lessons of Richard Boleslavsky

One of the events of The S Word: Merging Methodologies International Symposium held in Prague, 2017 was the presentation of Sergei Tcherkasski’s expansive book, Acting: Stanislavsky – Boleslavsky – Strasberg: History, Theory and Practice (St. Petersburg: RGISI, 2016). With its 816 pages, clear logic, accessible language and 403 rare archival photos from Russian, Polish, American and French archives, this book has become a milestone in today’s discussion of the contemporary state of the Stanislavsky System. It creates a map of the current development of Stanislavsky-based actor training and explains connections and divergences among many contemporary pedagogical approaches to acting both in Russia and internationally.The book received many enthusiastic reviews in Russian theatre publications and was awarded the National Prize for the Best Theatre Book’2016 «Театральный роман» (this title means both Theatrical Novel and Romance with Theatre, and is also the title of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel about the Moscow Art Theatre), and the International Stanislavsky Prize’2017 (awarded alongside with Tcherkasski to Valery Gergiev of Mariinsky Theatre, Kirill Krock of Vakhtangov Theatre, English actors Jude Law and Anthony Cher, and Dutch director Ivo van Hove).Among the book’s many merits, reviewers emphasized that Tcherkasski reintroduced the figure of Richard Boleslavsky, an important if not fundamental link between Russian and American theatre, and a key figure in the international dissemination of the Stanislavsky System. A large section of Tcherkasski’s book presentation at The S Word Symposium was devoted to Boleslavsky. This article provides a brief analysis of the development of Boleslavsky’s acting pedagogy.

M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

Reviewed by: M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang Esther Kim Lee M. BUTTERFLY. By David Henry Hwang. Directed by Julie Taymor. Cort Theatre, New York City. November 4, 2017. David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly is one of the most famous plays of the theatre canon. It has been included in anthologies, syllabi, and discussions of race, Orientalism, sexuality, gender, and performance. Its New York premiere in March 1988 was an instant hit and ran for 777 performances, a record number at the time. Hwang received the Tony Award for Best Play in 1988 and went on to become the most visible Asian American playwright internationally. When it was announced that the play would be revived on Broadway in fall 2017 and be directed by Julie Taymor, there was much anticipation over how Hwang and Taymor would reinterpret the play for twenty-first-century audiences. In 1988, the play generated much controversy over how a man can be deceived into falling in love with another man who pretends to be a woman. How could he not know? Many audience members, in shock, would ask the question while leaving the theatre. In 2017, such a question was not as shocking as it was in 1988, partly because many advancements have been made in understanding how sexual identity is fluid and performative. The scandalousness of the original production had worn off after almost thirty years, and it was no longer surprising to see the scenes in the play that made the 1988 audience gasp and shudder. Hwang may have felt that he needed to update the play and make it more relevant to the 2017 audience, or perhaps he wanted to tell a different story in the revival. He rewrote parts of the play and changed the relationship between the two main characters. The original play was based on a New York Times article about a French diplomat who had an affair with a Chinese opera singer for twenty years. He claimed that he thought the singer, who turned out to be a spy, was a woman. For the original play, Hwang deliberately did not do further research of the actual people and chose to imagine how their relationship could have been possible. For the revival, he reversed his position and included what he discovered about the real French diplomat and the Chinese opera singer. I took my undergraduate class on Asian American theatre at the University of Maryland on a field trip to New York City to see the play, and all of my twenty-five students and I sat eagerly to find out how it had been changed. Before seeing the play I stayed away from reviews, because I did not want to know in advance about the changes that Hwang made. The surprise came early, when the gender pronoun used for the Chinese opera singer was monsieur, not mademoiselle. My students and I looked at one another in confusion, and by the intermission we agreed that the layering of gender identity was made even more complex in the rewrites. The opera singer was a woman onstage though a man offstage, but s/he was actually a woman raised as a man. Click for larger view View full resolution Jin Ha and Company in M. Butterfly. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.) In directing the revival, Taymor compared the play to a Chinese puzzle and wanted to highlight the layers of identity, deception, and relationships. The set design by Paul Steinberg utilized large panels to represent the puzzle-like element of the play. The panels were manually moved by stagehands and folded up and down to reveal different images. Taymor stated in interviews that she did not want to use any of the cutting-edge technology that she, as the director of The Lion King and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, is most known for. Perhaps because of [End Page 560] her reputation, the manual movements of the panels and the bareness of the set were unexpected. Hwang’s play is about the theatricality of identity, and metatheatricality is key to its staging. The fourth wall is frequently broken, and at one moment Gallimard, the protagonist (played by British actor Clive Owen...

Le personnage du Juif dans l’œuvre d’Erckmann-Chatrian. Méditations sur l’iconoclasme

The essay begins by citing some objections to representative art by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Rene Girard. Lacoue-Labarthe happens to mention Alfred Rosenberg, who, as one of the Fascist “Aestheticians” of the xxth century (cf. Ferdinand Celine), argued that Jews were a menace to the arts. Themselves incapable of true creation, they were competent only to peddle other people’s culture, and the objects that passed through their hands were degraded in the process. The Alsatian historical novelists Erckmann-Chatrian wrote many stories containing Jewish characters. The best-known is probably Le Juif polonais dramatized, in a version made immensely popular, by the British actor Henry Irving under the title The Bells. After many years of collaboration, Chatrian accused Erckmann of Germanophilia in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, and their friendship ended disastrously. The treatment of Jews in the stories by these two authors is generally favorable. What is more to the point, despite their apparent superficiality, the tales sometimes raise questions of startling seriousness concerning the nature of Judaism and the very nature of art. In Le Sacrifice d’Abraham, a Jewish art dealer, Jonas (a recurrent type in these stories) dies trying to steal or, perhaps, recover a painting of that name from its author, Rembrandt. Implicit is the assumption that, because of its subject, it really belongs, or should belong, to Jonas. With Rembrandt, we have a striking case of ‘cultural appropriation’ avant la lettre. In L’Œil invisible, the question of representation is central. A witch drives people to suicide by confronting them with their double. An artist eventually does the same to her, and she falls victim to her own device. We cannot endure being brought face to face with an exact representation of ourselves. This story, however, contains a third party, a detached witness of this mortal struggle, another Jewish art dealer, Toubac, who buys and sells works of art which contain the record of others’ battles over representation. The Jew exists on the border between the transcendental and the material worlds, going back and forth, trading with both. What he will not do is participate in the tragic exchanges precipitated by the act of representation. Neither sorcerer nor artist, he refuses to descend into the arena of representation to wage war with the phantom images that populate it. The piece ends with the famous lines from Henri Michaux about Christ in the role of salesman, or intermediary between two worlds, as a vendor of tickets for the Beyond.

Henry Irving: Outstanding 19th Century British Actor. Concerning the Issue of the Genre of the Stage

The article is devoted to the English actor and theatrical producer of the Victorian Age, Henry Irving (John Henry Broddrib). During the course of his entire life on stage Irving aspired towards recognition of himself as a tragic actor. At the same time his natural gift revealed itself with full force in the genre of the melodrama and in characteristic roles. The article presents an analysis of the roles that disclose in the most precise and bright way the issue of the theater genre in the activities of Henry Irving. The production of the play “The Bells” by Leopold Lewis would become the indisputable theatrical victory of Irving as an actor and producer. The characteristic image of the respectable burgomaster and the repentant murderer Matthias acquires tragic features. William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” would be perceived in an ambivalent manner by the audiences and professional critics. The tragic prince of Denmark would present himself before the public as a live person with his passions, pain and turmoil. The tragedies in Irving’s productions differed cardinally from the traditional interpretations of that time, and the Victorian public was not prepared to accept at once such directional solutions. Notwithstanding this, the Lyceum Theater under his direction became the theatrical center of Victorian London. Matthias, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear and Richard III were the roles that disclosed the tragic duality of Henry Irving’s theatrical gift. Keywords: Henry Irving, theater of the Victorian Age, English theater, Shakespeare, melodrama, tragedy.

A randomised trial of the influence of racial stereotype bias on examiners\u2019 scores, feedback and recollections in undergraduate clinical exams

BackgroundAsian medical students and doctors receive lower scores on average than their white counterparts in examinations in the UK and internationally (a phenomenon known as “differential attainment”). This could be due to examiner bias or to social, psychological or cultural influences on learning or performance. We investigated whether students’ scores or feedback show influence of ethnicity-related bias; whether examiners unconsciously bring to mind (activate) stereotypes when judging Asian students’ performance; whether activation depends on the stereotypicality of students’ performances; and whether stereotypes influence examiner memories of performances.MethodsThis is a randomised, double-blinded, controlled, Internet-based trial. We created near-identical videos of medical student performances on a simulated Objective Structured Clinical Exam using British Asian and white British actors. Examiners were randomly assigned to watch performances from white and Asian students that were either consistent or inconsistent with a previously described stereotype of Asian students’ performance. We compared the two examiner groups in terms of the following: the scores and feedback they gave white and Asian students; how much the Asian stereotype was activated in their minds (response times to Asian-stereotypical vs neutral words in a lexical decision task); and whether the stereotype influenced memories of student performances (recognition rates for real vs invented stereotype-consistent vs stereotype-inconsistent phrases from one of the videos).ResultsExaminers responded to Asian-stereotypical words (716 ms, 95% confidence interval (CI) 702–731 ms) faster than neutral words (769 ms, 95% CI 753–786 ms, p < 0.001), suggesting Asian stereotypes were activated (or at least active) in examiners’ minds. This occurred regardless of whether examiners observed stereotype-consistent or stereotype-inconsistent performances. Despite this stereotype activation, student ethnicity had no influence on examiners’ scores; on the feedback examiners gave; or on examiners’ memories for one performance.ConclusionsExaminer bias does not appear to explain the differential attainment of Asian students in UK medical schools. Efforts to ensure equality should focus on social, psychological and cultural factors that may disadvantage learning or performance in Asian and other minority ethnic students.

Towards a more emotional geography of civic pride: a view from an English city

This article argues that civic pride has been relatively under-explored in geography and deserves greater attention as an emotional and political value associated with place. Through a case study of Nottingham, England, I examine how local civic actors perceive and express civic pride and the values it encompasses, using a discourse analysis of interviews, policy material and local media. I illustrate how civic pride is connected with everyday feelings of identity, community and what people value and aspire to in a given place, and demonstrate how we might think critically about civic pride’s connections to and relevance beyond local government. The analysis illustrates how, in the context of recent developments across British cities, civic actors and institutions engage with and value the city in different ways and that a diverse set of discourses and practices can emerge from a shared concern to protect civic identity and autonomy. Bringing together emotional and urban geographies literature, this paper challenges geographers to think carefully about how place-based values like civic pride can shape and reproduce often well-meaning but problematic discourses and practices within cities, but also how the underlying meanings and values associated with pride can surface in resistive and progressive ways.

Resistance and Resignation: Responses to Typecasting in British Acting

This article draws on 38 in-depth interviews with British actors to explore the operation of typecasting. First, we argue that typecasting acts as the key mechanism through which the ‘somatic norm’ is established in British acting. It delivers an oversupply of leading roles for white, male, middle-class actors while ensuring that those who deviate somatically are restricted to largely socially caricatured roles. Second, we focus on the career trajectories of ‘othered’ actors. While they frequently experience acting roles as offensive and discriminatory, we demonstrate how most nonetheless reluctantly accept the terms of their ‘type’ in order to survive and succeed. Third, we focus on the minority who have attempted to challenge their type. Here we find that successful resistance is accomplished by carefully choosing work that subverts the somatic norm. However, the ability to exercise such choice is highly contingent on resources associated with an actor’s class origin.

Acting Real: Testimony of Rachel Corrie on Stage

In response to the chaotic atmosphere of the twentieth century, defined by an enormous scepticism about politics and media, theatre emerged out as a source of truth through plays compiled from spoken testimonies of real people, interviews, documents and recordings of real events and many other authentic materials. Named variably as theatre of the real, documentary theatre or verbatim theatre, those plays challenged their audiences into an inescapable confrontation with real events and serious issues around the world. Edited by the British actor and theatre director Alan Rickman and the Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, one of the key examples of verbatim theatre, My Name is Rachel Corrie, was premiered in April 2005 at Royal Court in London. Based on Israel-Palestine conflict, the play is constructed on the e-mails and diaries of an American peace-activist Rachel Corrie who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003. After providing a history of documentary theatre, this paper discusses the controversial productions of My Name is Rachel Corrie as an example of testimony.

“Mislike Me Not for My Complexion…”: Ira Aldridge in Whiteface

Ira Aldridge, the first important black American Shakespearean actor, had an odd but remarkable theatrical career. Born in New York City in 1807, educated for a few years in the second Free School in lower Manhattan, employed in his youth at various menial jobs in the city, including a brief stint as a costume carrier for a visiting British actor, and then involved in several small dramatic productions put on by ragtag black acting companies at a short-lived establishment called the Theatre, Aldridge fell in love with the stage and aspired to become a professional actor. Since he could fulfil this ambition in the United States, which had proven not yet ready to accept black actors in the legitimate drama (Hill 17), he emigrated to the British Isles, where he was fortunate enough to secure his first engagement with top billing at London's Royal Coburg Theatre (now the Old Vic) in October 1825, when he was only eighteen years old. In those days it was customary to hail a talented young performer as a a name alluding to the great Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus. Garrick had been the first English Next came Mr. Betty, the phenomenally successful juvenile thespian who was heralded as the Young and thereafter the name was linked to theatrical precocity. Master Grossmith, a seven-year-old, was introduced on the stage as the Celebrated Infant and Miss Lee Sugg, another child prodigy, as the Young Roscia. Inevitably, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and several American Roscii and Rosciae, including a Kentucky Roscius, soon appeared. Since Aldridge was both young and black, he was quickly dubbed the an honorific title given extra resonance when theater managers began to spread the word that he was the son of a Christian Fulani prince from Senegal. Aldridge, whose staple role was Shakespeare's Othello, could be said to have made a career out of playing a Moor playing a Moor. This may have been an adroit theatrical strategy, given the obstacles a black neophyte would have had to overcome to be accepted as a legitimate player on a foreign stage. But at the outset this was an easy way to make a living. Though he could depend on his novelty value to draw people to the theater, there were only a limited number of roles a black performer could take on, and in the first half of the nineteenth century the normal practice in British theaters was to perform at least two plays each night and to change the bill every day. Long runs of a single play were common until later in the century, and then only in London. For Aldridge to be employable, he had to be able to offer a reasonable number of well-known roles and to keep moving from place to place. He could find a permanent position in one of the London theaters, nor could he secure engagements outside London for more than a week or two at a time. So he turned into a perpetually touring player, an exotic star who made his rounds principally in the provinces week after week, month after month, year after year after year. But first he had to establish a reputation as a performer. Being an African was enough; he also had to prove his credentials as a Roscius. One way he did this was to draw upon anti-slavery sentiments by playing long-suffering slaves in abolitionist melodramas set in the New World. Gambia in Thomas Morton's The Slave, Oroonoko in stage adaptations of Aphra Behn's eponymous novel, and Christophe in J. H. Amherst's The Death of Christophe, King of Hayti were the principal tragic roles he assumed early in his career to supplement his performances of Othello. He also played dark strangers, some of whom were villains: Zanga the Moor in Edward Young's The Revenge, Rolla the heroic Peruvian army commander in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro, and Hassan the vengeful Moor in Monk Lewis's gothic thriller The Castle Spectre. These heavy roles helped to establish his competence as a tragedian. …

Focus: Their Solidarity Saved Us

18 | International Union Rights | 24/3 FOCUS | FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Their Solidarity Saved Us In the early 1990s, a libel case in the UK attempted to stop British activists from challenging a UK company for its behaviour in the Philippines. William Baird Plc was not happy that British consumers were being asked to boycott the clothing it made, sold under well-known brands in popular department stores. However, the case never went to court and, while troubling to deal with, nor did it silence the campaign. This was due largely to the actions of Filipino trade unionists - an inspiring example of international solidarity from the global South to the North. Reporting trouble in the Philippines For some eight years 1983-90, a bi-monthly magazine called International Labour Reports (ILR) published news and features on the expanding global economy and workers’ rights worldwide. Based initially in Manchester and then at the workers’ education centre Northern College in South Yorkshire, ILR had solid backing from British unions such as the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU, now part of Unite) as well as aid agencies which funded us, for example to send bulk copies to the labour movements of South Africa and the Philippines fighting vicious regimes. Plus we built a substantial subscriber base of several hundred unions, activists, researchers, and others across the world. However, in March 1990, ILR was struck by a libel writ issued by Baird. Baird brought the case against Mayday Publications Ltd., the workers’ cooperative which published ILR, and the three named authors of an article in the magazine that month. At the same time, Baird hit a sister organisation Women Working Worldwide with a similar writ for a solidarity leaflet it was circulating, calling for a boycott of Baird products. Baird was producing under such labels as Telemac, Planet, Precis, Windsmoor and Dannimac and selling to retailers like Debenhams, C&A, Littlewoods, M&S, and BHS. So, although the company’s name was barely known by the British public, its clothing certainly was. At the heart of the cases lay a long-running dispute between Baird and the workforce at its subsidiary International Garment Manufacturing Corporation Ltd. (IGMC) in the Bataan Export Processing Zone in the Philippines. Along with many other foreign firms, Baird would have been attracted there by the cheap labour costs. It acquired IGMC in 1978, and the coats and jackets that its 1200+ workforce made there went largely to Europe, North America and Australia. From early on, the IGMC workers formed a strong union and engaged in collective bargaining, backed up by occasional strikes, managing to improve wages and working conditions. However, the situation in the Bataan EPZ generally was bad for workers, leading to a general strike in January 1987, which was dealt with by force when marines wounded and killed several people. Meanwhile, Baird was also expanding elsewhere in the region, opening another factory in the capital Manila and one in Indonesia. In January 1988, Baird suddenly dismissed some 200 IGMC workers, including key union officers, and issued its first threat to close the factory. It said this was due to financial losses, which the workers found hard to believe because of the amount of contracts coming in. The reduced workforce now had to work even harder to achieve similar outputs, and by February there was a sit-in inside the factory as well as a picket outside. The following month, Baird laid out the terms under which it would keep the factory open, moving now to individual targets for workers, piece-work, etc., with agreements to be signed by each worker, thereby ditching the collective agreements. The situation staggered on for eighteen months but then, on 20 September 1989, Baird suddenly issued a letter to the workforce announcing the total closure of its Bataan factory by 3.45pm that day, throwing the remaining 1000, mostly women, workers out of work. Now its stated reason was the workers’ go-slow. Since late July, the workers had been demanding a wage increase of 25 pesos a day (about 40 euro cents). The workers claimed the raise was required following a rise in the minimum wage. But the company said this threatened its viability. The...

Focus: Labour activists need greater protection for freedom of expression

20 | International Union Rights | 24/3 FOCUS | FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Labour activists need greater protection for freedom of expression A critical part of the work of trade unionists and labour activists, and indeed human rights activists more generally, is to challenge a wide range of actors, both state and private, who have impacted on human rights, and to hold these actors to scrutiny and to account. Of concern to ICTUR are those cases reported to us in which activists undertake such work, in a context that appears to be genuine and sincere human rights advocacy, and yet in which they are subject to forms of legal retaliation that either seek to punish them for their advocacy or that bar them from speaking out further. In recent years two cases stand out as examples of this kind of litigation, that of Andy Hall in Thailand, and of Wilson Sossion in Kenya. In both cases the plaintiffs are private corporate interests, claiming to have been damaged by the activists’ human rights work. The two cases have striking relevance for the question of transnational supply chain regulation and the growing demand for action around the intersection of transnational business and human rights generally. Hall is a British researcher, working for a Finnish NGO, examining the situation of migrant workers from Myanmar, working for a Thai company, supplying European markets. Sossion is a Kenyan union leader working with an international teachers’ union in Belgium, looking at the impacts of a US company. Thailand: British activist hounded by defamation law Migrant rights defender and researcher Andy Hall worked as a research coordinator for a Finnish NGO Finnwatch in 2012, which published his findings in the report Cheap Has a High Price in January 2013. The Natural Fruit Company Ltd. reacted to the report by pressing multiple criminal and civil charges against Hall. The company also cited an interview Hall gave to Aljazeera in Myanmar in response to his original prosecution as being defamatory. Natural Fruit also alleged Hall’s involvement in uploading on to Finnwatch website a confidential communication regarding the Finnwatch report. Natural Fruit filed two cases against Hall under criminal defamation provisions in Thailand's Criminal Code as well as two civil defamation cases. One of the criminal defamation cases also includes allegations under the Computer Crimes Act. Natural Fruit Company Ltd. is a company that produces pineapple products. The owner of Natural Fruit Mr. Wirat Piyapornpaiboon is the elder brother of Thailand's former labour minister and former general secretary of the Democratic Party Chalermchai Sri-On, who was also the senator of Prachuap Khiri Khan province for many years. Wirat Piyapornpaiboon has many other businesses. Wirat Piyapornpaiboon is an important actor in Thailand's pineapple industry as he is the President of the Thai Pineapple Industry Association (TPIA). TPIA represents over 60 pineapple companies in Thailand. Hall is a 37-year-old British national who lived in Thailand for 11 years working as an academic and promoting the rights of migrant workers in Thailand. Civil defamation case: the first of the four cases to reach a trial stage was a criminal defamation case which dealt with an interview Andy Hall gave to Aljazeera in Yangon, Myanmar, in April 2013. The case charges carried a maximum penalty of 1 year imprisonment. The trial was heard from 2 to 10 September 2014 at Prakanong Court, Bangkok. ICTUR sent Australian barrister Mark Plunkett, to observe proceedings. On 29 October 2014, the Court delivered a verdict dismissing the charges. Following various attempts to reinstate the case the Appeals Court dismissed the challenge on 18 September 2015, and the Supreme Court also dismissed the case on 3 November 2016. Criminal Defamation and Computer Crimes Case – Finnwatch Report: after seven preliminary hearings held between 17 November 2014 and 20 July 2015, the Bangkok South Criminal Court on 24 August 2015 decided to proceed to a criminal trial with the original criminal defamation and computer crimes prosecutions brought by Natural Fruit Company Ltd. The charges carried a combined maximum penalty of 7 years' imprisonment. Following a complex process with several rounds of preliminary hearings, the Bangkok South Criminal Court issued its verdict in this case on 20 September...

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: international retirement migration on film

ABSTRACTThe two movies aboutThe Best Exotic Marigold Hotel(2012 and 2015) were directed by John Madden. Starring a cast of famous British older actors, the narratives are set in a faded hotel in India. These are individuals who have relocated because their retirement dreams cannot be realised in their home country. They reflect the growing phenomenon of international retirement migration (IRM): the quickly growing upsurge of financially independent individuals seeking an affordable old age. In India they can claim a position of relative comfort and privilege. For a generation that grew up in a consumerist culture, upward mobility in the senior life stage has become a purchasable commodity through exodus to a developing country. This generation of retirees is generally in better health compared with prior seniors, with a longer life expectancy. Many have a background of travel experience, and an ethos that places their own pleasures in life as pivotal. While global numbers are unavailable, it is estimated that there are millions of retirees relocating to less-developed countries for an affordable retirement. At retirement locations such as the Marigold Hotel, the discrepancies that continue between nations, and local poverty, enable this practice. The events in these movies might be read as a recapitulation of imperialism expressed through retirement migration.

No-Drama Obama: Personal Memoirs, Bestsellers, and Qualitative Research: A Review

Personal memoirs and life histories are forms of qualitative research that from time to time appear on bestsellers lists. These forms of research detail the authors’ experiences of living and reflecting upon their everyday lives—lives that may be unique in some sense or lives made unique by the richness of the interplay of living, reflecting, and writing. In this review, I make the case for viewing moments in all lives as worthy of the development of personal memoir or life history and for using memoir as a way of generating takeaways or lessons learned. I review Elyn Saks’ (2007) memoir and bestseller about her life with schizophrenia, The Center Cannot Hold, and the British actor, author, and comedian, Stephen Fry’s 2006 documentary about bipolar disorder Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. Both are examples of life histories that provide an abundance of opportunities for learning about what we might otherwise never know.

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: &lt;em&gt;Australian Wines &amp; Food Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 1956–1960

Bringing a Taste of Abroad to Australian Readers: &lt;em&gt;Australian Wines &amp; Food Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 1956–1960

Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

ABSTRACTThis article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.

The Struggle over the Evacuation to the United Kingdom and Repatriation of Basque Refugee Children in the Spanish Civil War: Symbols and Souls

In May 1937, British charities and political activists combined forces to evacuate nearly 4000 Basque children from Spain to the United Kingdom. The evacuation marks one of the great chapters in twentieth century refugee history. Once General Franco's supporters conquered the whole of the Basque Country in early July 1937, a battle developed over the repatriation of the children. The historiography of these watershed events has focused on the bombing of Guernica as the cause of the evacuation, the impact upon domestic British politics and the role of centre and left activists in the struggle over the repatriation of the children to Franco’s Spain. This article provides a fresh context by exploring the role of the children as symbols of Francoist violence behind the lines in the controversy over the evacuation. It also places the repatriation battle in the new framework of the Francoist removal of children from political opponents. It further examines the right-wing British activists who advocated repatriation and explores their entangled relationship with Spanish Francoists.

Managing the world: conceptions of imperial rule between republicanism and technocracy

SUMMARYThe article examines a technocratic vision of empire arising in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its implications for the theorization of empires, the legitimation of large-scale political orders, and their spatial imagination. The role of the Roman model for the British in the decades after 1870 as a resource of policy advice, legitimation, and identity-building serves as a case study for analyzing the role of historical precedence for imperial elites. This analysis opens the perspective onto a notion of empire that significantly differs from the one discussed in recent debates on liberalism and empire: British political actors and observers delineate a concept of empire that is not universalist, but heterogeneous, hierarchical, and technocratic.

Heterosexual Love in the British Women's Liberation Movement: reflections from the Sisterhood and After archive

ABSTRACTThe question of how to be a heterosexual feminist has long vexed women's liberationists. This article is interested in how a set of British activist women in the 1970s dealt with the challenges of heterosexual love. The article's source for this is the Sisterhood and After archive, the relatively untouched tranche of interviews with leading activists in the women's liberation movement (WLM), compiled between 2010 and 2013 and held at the British Library. Through these intimate and often enigmatic sources, the author sets out to explore the space between the theory of loving men and its practice among a handful of women liberationists. In doing so the author emphasises the importance of a supra-political space, the private, in the composition of these narratives. In addition, the socialist complexion to the British women’s movement is considered in the context of the wider political moment of the 1970s.