Exile In England Research Articles

Walking with Bhekizizwe Peterson: The shadows and afterlives of exile

Zwelidumile “Dumile” Feni’s affecting journey unfolds as he flees South Africa in 1968, seeking political exile in England until 1978, and subsequently relocating to the United States, where he painted and sculpted until his passing in 1991. The spectral echoes of his life find resonance in his daughter’s narrative within Ramadan Suleman and Bhekizizwe Peterson's film ʻZwelidumile’. This article argues that we must situate this documentary in context by examining the emotional toll and narrative accounts of the longer history of displacement brought about by colonialism and apartheid. The analysis begins by listening to the haunting signs within the documentary, revealing three moving themes. The first theme peels back the layers of secrecy, spotlighting the revelation of Marriam’s biological father – drawing attention to the spectral and melancholic imbrication. The narrative then explores Feni’s life in exile, examining his deliberate silence on familial matters in South Africa. The last of the three themes looks into Marriam’s acknowledged but bewildering loss, exploring its implications for a sense of self and continuity. Zwelidumile exemplifies Bhekizizwe Peterson’s steadfast commitment to shedding light on the complex nuances of the black experience and emphasising narrative’s vital role as an essential component of what makes us human.

The ‘Homecoming’ of the Activists: How the Communist Refugees Returned from British Exile

This paper considers how many of the Communist refugees — German, Austrian and German-speaking Czechs — who were in exile in Britain during the Second World War, followed the dictates of the Party and returned home after the war to help rebuild their war-torn countries physically, politically, economically and socially. While the British authorities permitted the Czechs, as ‘friendly aliens’, to leave without too much delay, obstacles were put in the way of the German and Austrian refugees who frequently could not leave Britain until late 1946 or thereafter. The paper examines the relations between frustrated refugees and British officialdom as well as the reception the refugees received from their compatriots on their eventual ‘homecoming’. Generally speaking, the returning Communists did not fare well. In Austria, the returnees, many of whom were of course Jewish, were met with continuing antisemitism as well as anti-communism; in Czechoslovakia, as the Cold War set in, some were arrested while others fled once again; and in the GDR, the preferred destination of the returning German Communists, the label of ‘Westemigrant’ could prove a considerable handicap. All in all, despite the initial idealism, the common experience was one of disillusion and disappointment.

‘Op de grens van twee werelden’

‘At the border between two worlds’. Internationalism during the first year of German occupation This article maps the propaganda concerning the Netherlands during the first months of German occupation. With its neutrality violated and military defeated, and its Queen and government in exile in England, the international standing of the Netherlands had collapsed. In a brochure published in early July 1940 statesman and former prime minister Hendrikus Colijn was one of the first to draw far-reaching conclusions from this new situation, encouraging his compatriots not only to accept German occupation, but also to cooperate with the country’s new masters. Analysing the many reactions to Colijn’s brochure, this article argues that it encouraged propagandists on each side of the conflict to confront the meaning of the war and the role the Netherlands ought to play in it.

‘Our Second Capital on the Banks of the Thames’: The Evolution of the Anglophilia of Czechoslovak Exiles in Britain during the Second World War

ABSTRACT The study is the first to examine Anglo-Czechoslovak relations during the second world war from the perspective of discourse analysis. It reconstructs the evolution of the Czechoslovak exiles’ Anglophilia through articles published in three major exile newspapers – Čechoslovák, Mladé/Nové Československo and Nová svoboda – between October 1939 and May 1945. It claims that the new significant Other, whose image included numerous idealizations as well as objective reflections, liberated exiled Czechs and served as an important guide in the quest for a better future for their own country. The study also demonstrates how quickly favourable conditions can create fruitful transcultural space between nations that had, hitherto, been separated by geography, culture and language.

The influence of Nature study in the school (1933), by the Danish author Vilhelm Rasmussen, on Margarita Comas Camps and the project for the renewal of natural science teaching in the Second Spanish Republic

ABSTRACT In this article we examine the book El estudio de la naturaleza en la escuela by the Danish pedagogue Vilhelm Rasmussen (1869–1939), published by Editorial Labor in Barcelona in 1933, and its influence on the pedagogical standpoint of Margarita Comas Camps (1892–1972). Comas, who translated the book into Spanish, was a member of the group of educators of trainee teachers that spearheaded the project for the renewal of science teaching during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939). In line with the pedagogical principles and ideas of the New School and Nature Study movements, Rasmussen – science writer, social democratic politician, atheist and Darwinist – proposed replacement of the textbook and the memorisation of concepts in natural science classes, by observation, dialogue and drawing, as well as studies of the relationships between living things in their natural environment through outdoor excursions and the use of aquaria and terraria in the classroom. We analyse Comas’s Spanish translation of Nature study in the school published in England in 1929 from the Danish original of 1909, as well as Rasmussen’s pedagogical proposals that Comas included in Contribución a la metodología de las ciencias naturales (1937), the last of her books to be published prior to her exile in England. In Rasmussen, an author from a country geographically and culturally distant from Spain, Comas found an outstanding reference for the teaching of natural sciences.

The Interplay Between Fiction and Testimony: The Representation of Republican Exile in Britain in Esteban Salazar Chapela’s Perico en Londres

Esteban Salazar Chapela, an author exiled in Britain after the Spanish Civil War, wrote Perico en Londres as testimony for Republican exile in Britain. This article analyses Perico en Londres as an early example of autofiction, arguing that Salazar drew upon autobiography and fiction to create a space of co-existence that embraces the contradictions and ambiguity of exile. Blurring the line between fiction and autobiography allowed Salazar to express his feelings towards exile without complete exposure and promote the testimonial value of the narrative by giving a detailed yet fictionalized account of the intrahistoria of Republican exile in Britain.

America’s First Chaplain: The Life and Times of the Reverend Jacob Duché

America’s First Chaplain: The Life and Times of the Reverend Jacob Duché

Luta de “classes” e disputa “nacional” nos Açores de 1580? A família de Jácome Trigo perante a resistência terceirense e a conquista espanhola

In this study, we explore two documents of the Public Library and Regional Archive Luís da Silva Ribeiro, notably, one pension of 1583 and one petition, with a minute of witnesses, of 1584. Both address the privileged Jácome Trigo and fellows, confessed partisans of Philip II, opponents of the rebellion of Terceira in support of D. António. Hunted by the rebellious people and by the sectarian justice of Prior do Crato, the group endures the confiscation of assets, until condemned to death penalty, commuted to exile in England in 1582. Then, as proof of loyalty to the king of Spain, after a dangerous voyage, that costs the life of Jácome Trigo, the band lands in Lisbon, still in time to join the army of the marquis of Santa Cruz, which conquers Terceira in 1583. Besides, with less importance, we recall events, omitting a revision, related with the Iberic Union, for instance, the condescension of the Kingdom and the resistance of Terceira, as well as the noticeable alignment of the social strata, and still the motivations of all trends, of nationalism, to the anti-castilianism or simply the yearning of Sebastianism.

A Neglected Religious Thinker: José María Blanco White (1775-1841)

‘Dissent is the great characteristic of liberty’ was the central tenet in the life of José María Blanco White (1775-1841), a Spanish exile in Britain, whose fame as a man of letters often obscures the fact that he was first and foremost a religious thinker. The milestones of his life were set by his conversions, from Catholicism to Anglicanism (1814), and finally to Unitarianism (1835). Yet his theological ideas continue to be the least researched part of his oeuvre, mostly due to the problematic reception of his work, so that the ex-Catholic Blanco White - rather than the Protestant Blanco White - continues to occupy centre stage. This article reconstructs the spiritual biography of Blanco White, showing how skilfully he navigated through the world of European Protestantism, arguing that it was in Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy (1835) that he reached the peak of his creative powers as an original religious thinker.

Dennis Brutus and the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee in Exile, 1966–1970

ABSTRACT In July 1966, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC) re-emerged in exile in London. The arrival of Dennis Brutus, the coloured Rhodesian-born activist, poet, and educator, into the British capital provided the stimulus to renew calls for the exclusion of apartheid South Africa from international sport. In the years 1966–1970 that marked Brutus’s exile in Britain, SANROC elevated apartheid sport to the world’s attention. As this paper contends, SANROC’s success in discouraging foreign contact and competition with racialist sporting organisations, teams, or individuals from South Africa rested largely on Brutus’s ability to position himself at the nexus of an emergent human rights discourse that dominated the agendas of state institutions and international organisations throughout the 1960s. Brutus skilfully tethered the issue of racism in South African sport to broader discussions of human rights. SANROC’s anti-apartheid activism, however broad its transnational horizons, must also be read in its national context. As this paper will further contend, a deeper comprehension of the political and racial climate of 1960s Britain is central to understanding Brutus and SANROC’s experiences in exile in the years 1966–1970.

Adiós a la lengua materna: la escritura en lengua extranjera como acto de disidencia. El caso de José María Blanco White.

Este artículo analiza la relación que José María Blanco White sostenía con el idioma inglés y su propia lengua materna, el español. Exiliado por voluntad propia en Inglaterra a partir de 1810, el autor de origen sevillano expresa en un inicio su voluntad de convertirse en un hombre de letras británico, y de abandonar para siempre la escritura literaria en castellano. Esta renuncia lingüística implica una disidencia tanto política como religiosa, así como un paso en su evolución intelectual. Aunque Blanco White alcanza un alto prestigio como autor en Inglaterra en su lengua adoptiva, nunca abandonará del todo su compleja relación con España ni su expresión en idioma español. Se discute también cómo su supuesta identidad inglesa es una construcción imaginaria del autor que, si bien busca despojarse de sus raíces, carga constantemente a cuestas con ellas.

Amitav GhoshGun Island

peasant girl who becomes an inspiring soldier), Aster (a woman of noble birth who knows the worth of women), and Fifi (the woman who consorts with Italian officers to learn their strategies). The women want to do more than bear children and be comforts to soldiers; they desire to fight side- by-side with the men. In other words, they want to be more than what the world expects of them. By turns, the brutality and savagery of the war is exposed. The aggression of men is interrogated, and the hope rendered by a shadow king (while the Emperor Haile Selassie is in exile in England) permeates the action of an army that is deemed no match for the Italians. Of equal note is the portrait of the male characters fully drawn and complicated by their motivations: Ettore (the Jewish photographer/solider), Kidane (the leader of the Ethiopian resistance), and Carlos Fucelli (the merciless leader of the Italian forces). This is an amazing novel. It employs elegantly simple prose, the power of metaphor , and marvelous insights into human behavior. Its historic undertones provide insights on Ethiopia today, and like many other contemporary African women writers , Mengiste performs art. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Amitav Ghosh Gun Island New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 320 pages. Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, traces familiar crosscultural patterns evident in his earlier novels. There are journeys by land and water, diaspora and migration, experiences aboard ships, the world of animals and sea-creatures. Ghosh foregrounds environmental issues like climate change and the danger to fish from chemical waste dumped into rivers by factories, concerns that carry over from earlier books like The Hungry Tide and The Great Derangement. Gun Island describes the quest of Deen, a scholar and collector of rare books, who returns from New York, his city of domicile , to the Sunderbans in West Bengal to unravel the mystery and legend of a seventeenth -century merchant, Bonduki Sadagar , translated “The Gun Merchant,” and his persecution by Manasa Devi, mythical goddess of snakes. In a talk held in New Delhi after the release of the novel, Ghosh stated that the merchant “was a trope for trade.” The merchant and the goddess dramatize “the conflict between profit and the world.” In the novel, the goddess pursues the merchant to make him aware of other realities like the animal world: “Humans— driven, as was the Merchant, by the quest of profit—would recognize no restraint in relation to other living things.” We learn that the old Arabic name for Venice was al-Bunduqevya, which is also the name for guns. Deen concludes that the name Bonduki Sadagar did not perhaps mean the Gun Merchant but the Merchant who went to Venice. When Deen travels to Venice to research further on the Gun Merchant, he discovers that many Bangladeshis are being employed as illegal migrant labor. Their hazardous journey across the Middle East and Africa and the strong, even militant opposition to their presence in the city by Italian authorities form a major segment of the second part of the novel, contrasting with the Gun Merchant ’s past, prosperous journey to Venice. Women are a stronger presence and force in the novel than in Ghosh’s earlier fiction. Cinta is a scholar from Venice working on the role of Venice in the medieval spice trade from India. Piya Roy, the cetologist from The Hungry Tide, reappears in this novel and offers the aging, lonely Deen hope of a romantic partner. Nilima Bose runs the Badabon Trust, an effective charitable organization, and Lubna is a Bangladeshi immigrant working for the cause of illegal immigrants. In depicting a wide range of diverse characters from various countries and subtly invoking myth and history, fact and fiction, Ghosh has created a work that contrasts nostalgia for a lost past with concerns for the contemporaneous. Rita Joshi Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi University Books in Review 98 WLT AUTUMN 2019 ...

Edward Timms (1937–2018): A Memoir

Austrian Studies 27 (2019), 237–45© Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 Edward Timms (1937–2018): A Memoir RITCHIE ROBERTSON University of Oxford Edward Timms died on 21 November 2018 at the age of eighty-one. The twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Austrian Studies contained his account of the founding of the yearbook.1 Here I shall touch on that story only briefly, in order to give a broad overview of Edward’s life, work and character. As an academic he reshaped his discipline by sharply defining two areas, Austrian Studies and, later, German-Jewish Studies, concentrating especially on the lives and works of Jewish exiles in Britain. All who knew him will remember him, above all, as an exceptionally fine human being. His frank and detailed autobiography, Taking Up the Torch (2011), reveals how, in Nietzsche’s phrase, he became who he was.2 Edward Francis Timms was born on 3 July 1937, the third of eight children of the Rev. John Timms, Vicar of Buckfastleigh in Devon, and Joan Timms, née Axford; an older brother later came to light and was welcomed into the family. Like most of his siblings, Edward attended Christ’s Hospital, which admitted children from lower-income families without a fee. In 1956 he started reading Modern Languages (French and German) at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he soon decided to concentrate on German, taught first by E. K. Bennett and then by F. J. Stopp. With Stopp he also took a comparative paper on ‘Satire’, which included early modern texts such as Brant’s Narrenschiff [Ship of Fools] as well as works by Swift, Pope and Pascal; its lasting effect is visible not only in the attention Edward would later pay to ironic techniques and satirical archetypes in Kraus’s writing, but also in a remarkable, much later essay on the possibility of Christian satire.3 After a year teaching in Nuremberg, he began a PhD thesis on Karl Kraus, supervised by the charismatic Peter Stern. Edward would later become the world’s pre-eminent Kraus scholar. How he came to Kraus is recounted in his autobiography. As an undergraduate at 1 Edward Timms, ‘The Founding of Austrian Studies. A Collaborative Enterprise’, Austrian Studies, 25 (2017), 6–11. 2 Edward Timms, Taking up the Torch: English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multicultural Commitments (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011). 3 ‘The Christian Satirist: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 31 (1995), 101–16. See also ‘Der Satiriker und der Christ — ein unvereinbarer Gegensatz?’, in Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses Göttingen 1985, ed. by Albrecht Schöne (Tübingen, 1986), ii, 201–08. Ritchie Robertson 238 Cambridge he had scarcely connected literature with politics. His favourite topic, on which he was fortunately able to write in his final exams, was the depiction of nature by the outwardly placid, though inwardly complex Adalbert Stifter — still a world away from the biting satirist Kraus. After graduating, however, Edward’s experience of modern Germany made him raise questions about the relation between the present and the past. A student teacher he knew in Nuremberg, Hans Keith, responded to his enquiry about critical authors by advising him to read Karl Kraus, along with the Weimar satirist Kurt Tucholsky. Kraus’s opaque and intricate writings provided a challenge which Edward addressed, guided by Peter Stern, who owned a complete set of Kraus’s satirical journal Die Fackel [The Torch]. It is probable that Die Fackel, nowadays available online, was not present at that time in any British library. Undertaking a study of Kraus was adventurous. He still has an uneasy place on the margins of the German canon. Aside from some poetry, he did not write in familiar literary genres. Even his huge anti-war drama, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit [The Last Days of Mankind, 1922], is sui generis, though its use of documentary materials has a partial precedent in Büchner’s Dantons Tod [Danton’s Death, 1834] and successors in post-war documentary dramas by Peter Weiss and Heinar Kipphardt. Most of Kraus’s work, consisting of pamphlets and journalism, is by its nature diffuse and difficult to master. The twenty-volume...

Louis Rose. Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature.

Louis Rose’s book Psychology, Art, and Antifascism: Ernst Kris, E. H. Gombrich, and the Politics of Caricature tells the multilayered story of the two twentieth-century Viennese art historians and psychologists Ernst Kris and E. H. Gombrich and of their unfinished project of a history of caricature, “a seminal . . . effort at bridging scientific research and humanist scholarship” (3–4). Kris and Gombrich’s attempt at integrating art history, the psychology of image making, and political analysis is set against the backdrop of the interwar Austrian Republic’s demise, the activities of exile intellectuals in World War II, and the rise of propaganda. By intricately linking intellectual, cultural, and political history, Rose’s study can itself be understood as “a model of integration” (4), not unlike the project that Rose portrays in his book. The book’s early chapters introduce the biographical and intellectual influences that would converge in Kris and Gombrich’s approach to caricature. Both scholars came from assimilated liberal Austrian-Jewish upper-middle-class families and were affected by the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy and the political and intellectual crisis of the interwar Austrian republic. Kris’s career began with studies in late-Renaissance art history at the University of Vienna after World War I. As curator of Vienna’s venerable Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kris’s research in sixteenth-century “borderline art” set the stage for his turn toward psychoanalytic theory and practice (25); a further influence was the innovative cultural studies approach of the Warburg Institute, located in exile in England after 1933. Without fully reconciling his dual roles as museum curator and psychoanalyst, Kris, with his student and assistant Gombrich, “turned to caricature as a means of exploring the borderline regions of art history and psychological science” (46).

Negotiating the ‘I’ and the ‘We’: Aspects of Modernism in the Exile Novels of Anna Gmeyner and Martina Wied

This article focuses on two novels written by Austrian-born Jewish women writers who were forced into exile in Britain by the National Socialists: Anna Gmeyner's Café du Dôme and Martina Wied's Das Krähennest. The article discusses the innovative features of both works, such as different levels of reality, the doppelgänger motif, and performativity, as well as how these fit in with expanding definitions of modernisms.

Lay Catholic Support for Exiled Polish Intellectuals in Britain, 1942–1962

This article examines the hitherto unexplored role of lay Catholics in the tertiary education of Polish exiles in Britain, from the early 1940s to the beginning of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. It will examine the work of the Newman Association, a predominantly lay Catholic graduate society, as a case study to reveal how lay activism towards European exiles was influenced by a range of social, theological and political factors. It will highlight the ways in which support for Polish Catholic education could be manifested, including the establishment of a cultural hub in London, a scholarship programme to assist Polish students in British and Irish universities, and the development of cultural links with individuals and organisations within Poland. Ultimately, this article demonstrates the growing confidence of educated lay Catholics in breaking out of their historically subordinate role within the English Catholic Church in the years prior to Vatican II.

Locating exile: decolonization, anti-imperial spaces and Zimbabwean students in Britain, 1965–1980

Exile is usually cast as a time of hardship, narrated through tropes of nostalgia and loss. Yet it is not always experienced and remembered in this way. This article provides a counterpoint to the familiar nostalgic lament by exploring the narratives of Zimbabwean students ‘in exile’ in Britain during the country's liberation war of 1965–1980, who looked back on their stay in the imperial heartland as a time of opportunity and excitement. They recalled their own youthful militancy, the optimism of liberation movements before independence and invoked the conviviality of joint political campaigns with British-based allies. The article explains their up-beat recollections by locating exile in transnational socio-political spaces created by Rhodesia's contested sovereignty, focusing on exiles' relations with mainstream liberal-left solidarity organizations, with Caribbean/black British groups and the liberation movements' own transnational networks. By locating exile in this way, the article extends two hitherto disconnected bodies of scholarship – on southern African nationalisms in the making and British decolonization and postcolonial cultural politics. It highlights how Zimbabwean students helped foster liberation movements' international standing and their influence on post-independence ideas of status. The article also offers a new vantage point on Britain's re-racialized cultural politics, as performed in middle-class spaces on student campuses and internationalist campaigns. Zimbabwean students' accounts of exile in Britain can thus do more than reveal the inadequacies of generalisations about a singular exile condition. Their narratives of the opportunities and sociability of exile in Britain reveal the occlusions of narrow military versions of southern African liberation history, while adding new, transnational dimensions to historical geographies of decolonization, urban cosmopolitanism and the African presence in 1960s and 1970s Britain.

Remaking the comedia: Spanish classical theater in adaptation

HARLEY ERDMAN AND SUSAN PAUN DE GARCIA (eds). Remaking the Comedia. Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation. Woodbridge: Tamesis. 2015. xix + 303 pp. ISBN 978 1 85566 292 6.Harley Erdman and Susan Paun de Garcia approach the topic of adaptation in both a textual and performance form. In their edited volume, scholarly work as well as performance as research are well represented in 26 essays by Comedia scholars, translators and theatre practitioners. This book is divided holistically in four parts, 'Theorizing', 'Surveying', 'Spotlighting', and 'Shifting'. Although this division is occasionally ambiguous and calls for a conceptualization in the preface, case studies featured in each chapter survey productive ways of adapting Comedia for current audiences.Leading the first part of this book are two essays commissioned to Catherine Larson and Susan L. Fischer that provide a theoretical introduction to what entails remaking the Comedia. Larson proposes in her essay to overcome the tiresome discussion of authorial intention and directorial vision in light of adaptation theory, and eloquently asserts that the essays contained in this volume are a response to the complexity of the theatrical event. In a similar fashion, Fischer points to the role of the audience as a moving force that makes the remaking of the play necessary both on the page and on the stage. Alejandro Gonzalez Puche and Laurence Boswell close this section with some thoughts based on their directorial experiences staging Comedia in Colombia, China, the UK and Spain. Their reflections on the challenges of cultural and linguistic specificity of their productions abound on the otherness of the texts. Boswell contends that his experience directing Lope de Vega's plays taught him to approach the staging as a remodel rather than a remake or a remix, for which he proposes a provocative training method that eventually could lead to the formation of a bilingual troupe in English and Spanish.Performance tradition is a central point of Part two, in which Charles Victor Ganelin revisits nineteenth-century refundiciones, and Valerie Hegstrom and Amy Williamsen offer an informed survey of early modern 'dramaturgas' that reveal their scant presence on the stages of the US, the UK, Spain and Chile. A fact that Jason Yancey corroborates when he notices in his review of Chamizal Siglo de Oro Festival that only plays by Sor Juana and Maria de Zayas have been featured in the 40 years of its existence. Duncan Wheeler unearths the professional activities of Pepe Estruch. An exile in England and Uruguay, where he collaborated frequently with Margarita Xirgu, upon his return to Madrid to teach at RESAD, Estruch was mentor of a generation of actors and directors that transformed the performance of Comedia in Spain. …

Unpacking Texts: Émile Zola’s Pages d’exil as Suitcase Narrative

This article focuses on Pages d’exil (1898), Émile Zola’s journal recounting his escape from France after being sentenced to prison following the Dreyfus Affair and his eleven-month exile in Britain. Inspired by Edward Said’s writings on exile and recent scholarship in museum studies examining migration, exile, and relocation, the article argues that Pages d’exil can be considered a “suitcase narrative.” It performs an object-focused reading centering on items of dress—things typically contained in a suitcase—to illuminate the conditions that Zola faced during these tumultuous months and their impact on his creative production. It posits that Pages d’exil is a personal crisis narrative taking form across modes of expression, including the journal, Zola’s correspondence, and his photographs. As such it holds a unique place within Zola’s works, provides compelling insights into the textual-visual turn of the author’s late years, and anticipates characteristics of twentieth-century modernist literature.

Isabel de Madariaga (1919–2014)

Occasionally, the scholarly world is disturbed by the publication of a book so controversial that it shoots over the historiographical landscape like a comet, leaving trails of sparks behind it in the form of heated discussion and reviews. All too frequently, however, such books soon crash to earth, leaving posterity to wonder what all the fuss was about. Rather less often, a work appears that so transforms our understanding of its subject that it leaves a permanent imprint on everything written in its wake. Isabel de Madariaga's Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great is just such a book. Universally acknowledged as a classic on its first publication in 1981, it was reissued in 1990 by Yale University Press, translated into many other languages (the Russian edition appeared in 2002), and is still in print in a variety of paperback editions. (1) Few historical monographs published in the last 50 years can claim the same longevity; fewer still have had quite such a revolutionary effect on their field. Ignored by the historical establishment on both sides of the Iron Curtain and mocked by generations of popular biographers as a libertine and a hypocrite, Catherine was portrayed instead by de Madariaga as one of Russia's most sophisticated rulers--a tolerant and engaging woman determined, despite the many obstacles in her way, to establish both Russia's place in European civilization and its status as a European great power. Indeed, it was the links that the author established between these aims that gave the book its explanatory power. For this was no ordinary and times: it was a full-scale reinterpretation of the significance of the second half of the 18th century for modern Russian history, placing culture at the heart of an integrated analysis of government, politics, society, and the economy. In the light of the astonishing levels of productivity that Isabel de Madariaga maintained in the last 30 years of her life, it is not always easy to remember that Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great marked the crown of a distinctly unconventional career. Not until 1982, a year after the book's publication, was its author promoted to a personal chair at London University's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she had been appointed to a Readership--her first permanent academic post--only in 1971. Academic life had not been made easy for her, and she sometimes made it hard for others by seeming aloof and intimidating. She had few research students before she retired in 1984 at the age of 65, at a time when 60 was the standard retirement age for women. The most notable of her pupils were Janet M. Hartley and Pia Pera, who found it amusing that her supervisor should compliment her on the elegance of her spoken Italian. With celebrity, however, came a degree of relaxation, and in the autumn of her life, when at last it seemed that Russia might be accepted as part of Europe, as de Madariaga had always been convinced it should be, she was feted by scholars there in a way that had seemed impossible to predict for much of the 20th century. Born in Glasgow, where her mother, the economic historian Constance Archibald (1878-1970) had graduated in 1905 and seven years later married a Spanish engineer, Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978), Isabel had an exceptionally cosmopolitan upbringing as the family followed her father's burgeoning new career as diplomat and liberal statesman. Between 1921 and 1928, Salvador de Madariaga was attached to the League of Nations in Geneva. In 1928, he became the first King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Literature at Oxford before moving briefly in 1931 to the United States of America as ambassador for the Spanish Republic. While he remained as Spain's permanent representative to the League of Nations, there followed a two-year spell as ambassador in Paris and another as a government minister in Madrid before civil war forced the family into permanent exile in England. …