Manchester University Press

A unflinching audit of the damage done by fourteen years of Conservative government.

What went wrong with Britain? presents a comprehensive account of the devastating legacy left by the Conservative government. Shining a light into every dark corner, the book exposes the full extent of the damage inflicted on the country’s economy, social fabric and political integrity.

When the Conservatives were voted out of government in July 2024, they left behind a miserable record of rising poverty, inequality and division. This book reveals the forces that have driven the country to the point of crisis, from austerity and economic mismanagement to sheer political dysfunction. Each chapter offers new insights into the far-reaching consequences of government policies that prioritised ideology, personal ambition and party politics over the public good.

Examining the rise of populism, the politics of Brexit, the UK’s response to the pandemic and the steady erosion of public trust, this shocking account of the legacy of Conservative government from 2010 to 2024 is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand exactly what went wrong with Britain.

A city burns, and a queen burns for love: Dido, Queen of Carthage re-imagines one of the great legendary stories. The encounter between a wandering hero and an African queen engenders love and loss, eroticism and absurdity, childish simplicity and compelling eloquence. Written for children to perform in the 1580s, Dido is nonetheless a remarkable play, revolutionary in its approach to character, blank verse, and audiences.
This volume is the first single-text scholarly edition in English. It is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and theatre practitioners.
The edition features an accessible text, lightly punctuated for ease of reading and speaking. It incorporates new research into authorship (which indicates that Marlowe wrote the play), a detailed analysis of Dido’s sources, and a survey of criticism; it assesses the evidence for early performances and provides extensive information about modern productions.

This book explores radical dissent from orthodox mainstream economics, and sets out a theoretically grounded vision for the emerging paradigm of social ecological economics. At the heart of this paradigmatic shift lies an acknowledgement of the inextricable embeddedness of economies in biophysical reality and social structure. The struggle for this transformative vision unfolds through a critical examination of mainstream environmental thought, followed by a nuanced evaluation of contributions from Marxists, socialists, critical institutionalists, feminists and Post-Keynesians grappling with the urgent environmental crisis.

Synthesising insights from these diverse and heterodox schools, the book navigates the philosophical underpinnings of science, embracing a critical realist approach that challenges not only mainstream economic thought but also eclectic pluralism, relativism and strong constructionism. The question of what constitutes revolutionary science is explored in light of works by Kuhn, Schumpeter and Neurath, emphasising the pivotal role of values and ideology in works from Marx to Gramsci.

Building on these radical and philosophical foundations, the book articulates a preanalytic vision of social ecological economics, dismantling entrenched notions of growth and efficiency in favour of a framework centered on social provisioning and needs embedded in ethics. In a thought-provoking conclusion, the book applies its analytical lens to the multiple crises of modernity within industrialised capital-accumulating economies. An agenda for social ecological transformation toward diverse alternative economies emerges, providing a compelling call to action in the face of contemporary challenges.

By the late 1960s cartographic formats and spatial information had become a regular feature in many conceptual artworks. This volume offers a rich study of conceptualisms’ mapping practices that includes more expanded forms of spatial representation.

The book presents twelve in-depth case studies that address artists’ engagement with matters of space at a time when space was garnering new significance in art, theory and culture. The chapters shed fresh light on an evident ‘spatial turn’ that took place from the postwar to the contemporary period, revealing how it was influenced by larger historical, social and cultural contexts.

In addition to raising questions about conceptualism’s relationship to the world, the contributors illustrate how artists’ cartographies served as critical sites for formulating their politics, upsetting prevailing systems and graphing new, heterogenous spaces.

Global Indigeneity is a term that reflects shared recognition of sovereignty among Indigenous peoples. Terms like global Indigeneity, transnational, and relational are in use to describe both ancient and contemporary connections between Indigenous peoples all over the world. This edited volume brings together a range of Indigenous perspectives, forming a global network of writers, thinkers, and scholars connected by common investment in Indigenous futures. This transnational solidarity results in collective activism and envisioning – a joint investment in futures free of the tyrannies imposed by settler-colonialism.

This edited volume assembles collective visions of Indigenous futures, contemplations of the potential of digital technologies, and considerations of Indigenous intimacies, relationalities and manners in which we locate ourselves in an increasingly global, connected world. Together, they present possibilities and the practicalities required to bring them to fruition.

This book documents the political and cosmological processes through which the idea of ‘total territorial rule’ came into being in the context of early- to mid-nineteenth-century Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Analysing ideas at the core of the modern international system, Pluriversal sovereignty and the state develops a decolonial theoretical framework informed by a ‘pluriverse’ of multiple ontologies of sovereignty to argue that the territorial state itself is an outcome of imperial globalisation.
Anti-colonialism up to the middle of the nineteenth century was grounded in genealogies and practices of sovereignty that developed in many localities. By the second half of the century, however, the global state system and the states within it were forming through colonising and anti-colonising vectors. By focusing on the ontological conflicts that shaped the state and empire, we can rethink the birth of the British Raj and locate it in Ceylon some 50 years earlier than in India. In this way, the book makes a theoretical contribution to postcolonial and decolonial studies in globalisation and international relations by considering the ontological significance of ‘total territorial rule’ as it emerged historically in Ceylon.

Through emphasising one important manifestation of modernity and coloniality — the territorial state — the book contributes to studies in the politics of ontological pluralism in sovereignty, postcolonial and decolonial international studies, and globalisation through colonial encounters.

What is folk horror and how culturally significant is it? This collection is the first study to address these questions while considering the special importance of British cinema to the genre’s development.

The book presents political and aesthetic analyses of folk horror’s uncanny landscapes and frightful folk. It places canonical films like Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) in a new light and expands the canon to include films like the sci-fi horror Doomwatch (1970–72) and the horror documentary Requiem for a Village (1975) alongside filmmakers Ken Russell and Ben Wheatley.

A series of engrossing chapters by established scholars and new writers argue for the uniqueness of folk horror from perspectives that include the fragmented national history of pagan heresies and Celtic cultures, of peasant lifestyles, folkloric rediscoveries and postcolonial decline.

Marian maternity in late-medieval England takes advantage of the fifteenth century’s intense interest in the Virgin Mary, the best-documented mother of the medieval period, to examine the constructions and performances of maternity in vernacular religious texts. By bringing together texts and authors that are not often discussed in tandem, this study offers a rich examination of the multiple factors at play as Marian material circulated among experienced devotional readers.

Taking a close look at the private devotional reading of late-medieval patrons, the book shows how texts including Chaucer’s poetry, Margery Kempe’s Boke, and legendaries of female saints are saturated with indirect references to and imitations of the Virgin. Marian maternity in late-medieval England employs a matricentric feminist approach to discern how readers’ devotional literacies inform their understanding and imitation of the Virgin’s maternal practice. Attending to internal cues in the texts, to manuscript contexts, and to the evidence and content of readers’ multiple literacies, the author examines Marian maternity as both theological concept and imitable practice. The result is a book that explains late-medieval perceptions of Mary’s maternity and sets them against readers’ devotional, emotional and relational circumstances.

Let’s spend the night together explores how sex and sexuality provided essential elements of British youth culture in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It shows how the underlying sexual charge of rock ‘n’roll – and pop music more generally – was integral to the broader challenge embodied in the youth cultures that developed after World War Two. As teenage hormones rushed to move to the music and take advantage of the spaces opening up through consumption, education and employment, so the boundaries of British morality and cultural propriety were tested and often transgressed. Be it the assertive masculinity of the teds or the lustful longings of the teeny-bopper, the gender-bending of glam or the subterranean allure of an underground club/disco, the free love of the 1960s or the punk provocations in the 1970s, sex was forever to the fore and, more often than not, underpinned the moral panics that fitfully followed any cultural shift in youthful style and behaviour.

Drawing from scholarship across a range of disciplines, the Subcultures Network explore how sex and sexuality were experienced, presented, conferred, responded to and understood within the context of youth culture, popular music and social change in the period between World War Two and the advent of AIDS. The essays locate sex, music and youth culture in the context of post-war Britain: with a widening and ever-more prevalent media; amidst the loosening bonds of censorship; in a society shaped by changing patterns of consumption and the emergence of the ‘teenager’; existing, as Jeff Nuttall famously argued, under the shadow of the (nuclear) bomb.

Stuart Brisley is a pioneering multi-media and performance artist who developed performance art as a form of social action in the 1960s and 1970s. This book assesses his seminal influence on British art through a focus on his lifelong engagement with the histories and imaginaries of revolution.

Linking revolutionary history with material from a critical dialogue established with Brisley over the last decade, the book recognises Brisley's corpus as a fascinating stage for addressing important questions about the relationship of art, politics and history. How do we make sense of politically committed art in a contemporary context where revolution has supposedly died or is deemed impossible? What can the afterlives of performance art tell us about the historical past, including the promises and contradictions of revolutionary time?

Becoming a mother charts the diverse and complex history of Australian mothering for the first time, exposing the ways it has been both connected to and distinct from parallel developments in other industrialised societies. In many respects, the historical context in which Australian women come to motherhood has changed dramatically since 1945. And yet examination of the memories of multiple maternal generations reveals surprising continuities in the emotions and experiences of first-time motherhood.

Drawing upon interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, history, psychology and sociology, Carla Pascoe Leahy unpacks this multifaceted rite of passage through more than 60 oral history interviews, demonstrating how maternal memories continue to influence motherhood today. Despite radical shifts in understandings of gender, care and subjectivity, becoming a mother remains one of the most personally and culturally significant moments in a woman’s life.

This is a book about what people imagine it means to live in a world where private property is dominant, and their fears – and sometimes hopes – about living in a future world where private property has disappeared. In the propertied imagination, private property is a fragile thing, an institution beset by terrifying enemies and racialised and gendered mobs: Levellers and Diggers, socialists and anarchists, fervent religious radicals, abolitionists, feminists, and haughty welfare-state bureaucrats. The history of private property is the history of a recurring nightmare that one or another of these groups would storm the castle and take control. That threatened social chaos is the central unifying story of this book.


Private property and the fear of social chaos starts by charting the thinkers who laid the foundations for how we understand private property, including Locke, Burke, Marx and Engels. The book looks at how their ideas have been put into practice in ways that continue to shape the modern world, from Harry Truman’s housing policies and the anti-abolitionist George Fitzhugh to Margaret Thatcher and Elon Musk. Arguing that the spectre of ‘the mob’ has been intimately interconnected with the idea of private property throughout capitalist modernity, the book ambitiously narrates this history from the early colonisation of the Americas to Silicon Valley, and the future of human colonisation in space.

An inspiring account of three women artists who pioneered new forms of the nude.

Even in the bohemian world of avant-garde Paris, certain rules had to be obeyed. One of these rules was that women artists did not paint nudes. Yet three women would challenge this prohibition, offering their own distinct takes on the classic genre.

Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy and Marie Vassilieff painted in different styles, but they were united in their fascination for the nude. Their artistic explorations saw them experimenting with a range of cutting-edge subjects, including the male nude, the Black female nude, the pregnant nude and the nude self-portrait, a genre that few artists would tackle until half a century later.

Painting her pleasure situates the work of Valadon, Charmy and Vassilieff within and against modernism, drawing parallels with later feminist artists and philosophers. Unravelling the complexities of early twentieth-century gender regimes and persistent cultural stereotypes, it provides an illuminating history of women, sexuality and the body.

Imperial Inequalities takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare. In doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe’s global empires. The idea of ‘imperial inequalities’ provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities.

This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces. Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world. These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue durée.
This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities

Living with water brings together sociologists, geographers, artists, writers and poets to explore the ways in which water binds, immerses and supports us. Drawing from international research on river crossings, boat dwelling, wild swimming, sea fishing, and drought impacts, and navigating urban waters, glacial lagoons, barrier reefs and disappearing tarns, the collection illuminates the ways that we live with and without water, and explores how we can think and write with water on land. Water offers a way of attending to emerging and enduring social and ecological concerns and making sense of them in lively and creative ways. By approaching Living with water from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives, and drawing on research from around the world, this collection opens up discussions that reinvigorate and renew previously landlocked debates.

This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, Clean water and sanitation

Since the early 2000s, Turkey has shown an unprecedented interest in its diaspora. This book provides the first in-depth examination of the institutionalisation of Turkey's diaspora engagement policy since the Justice and Development Party's rise to power in 2002, the Turkish diaspora's new role as an agent of diplomatic goals, and how Turkey's growing sphere of influence affects intra-diaspora politics and diplomatic relations with Europe. The book is based on fieldwork in Turkey, France and Germany, and interviews conducted with diaspora organisation leaders and policymakers.

Diasporas have become transformative for relations at the state-to-state level and blur the division between the domestic and the foreign. A case study of Turkey's diasporas is significant at a time when emigrants from Turkey form the largest Muslim community in Europe and when issues of diplomacy, migration and citizenship have become more salient than ever.

In May 2019, Narendra Modi won the world’s largest election. Defying expectations, he led his Bharatiya Janata Party to a resounding victory, with the highest vote share for any party in thirty years, and was re-elected as India’s Prime Minister.

What accounts for the scale of Modi’s win? Why, despite economic hardship and social strife, did Indians vote so overwhelmingly for him and the BJP? This book explains the economic, social and cultural processes that shaped political passions in India during the spring and summer of 2019. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together a stellar team of economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and geographers to explain Modi’s win. Together, the contributors compel us to take seriously the ‘structures of feeling’ in politics.

Love him or hate him, Modi secured for himself a decisive re-election as India’s Prime Minister. Passionate politics is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how that happened.

Transnational solidarity excavates the forgotten histories of solidarity that were vital to radical political imaginaries during the ‘long’ 1960s. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. The book traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border crossings — of nation, race and class — made by grassroots activists.

This diverse collection draws links between exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, post-colonial immigrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany who campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with wider liberation struggles. Meanwhile, Arab immigrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found myriad ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as transnational activist networks against Portuguese colonial rule in Africa.

Bringing together original research with contributions from veteran activists and artists, this interdisciplinary volume explores how transnational solidarity was expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries, film and print cultures, art and sport, political campaigns and armed struggle. It presents a novel perspective on radical politics of the global sixties which remains crucial to understanding anti-racist solidarity today.

With a foreword by Vijay Prashad.

In the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science.

Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richardson, who undertook various tours of England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the sisters Katherine and Martha Wilmot, who travelled to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, the political salon hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many countries with her husband, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War.

Using a methodology informed by literary and design theory, art history, material culture studies and tourism studies, the book examines a wide range of objects, from painted fans “of the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece” and the Pope’s “bless’d beads”, to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.

Since the late nineties, the UK has deported thousands of people to Jamaica. Many of these ‘deportees’ left the Caribbean as infants and grew up in the UK. In Deporting Black Britons, Luke de Noronha traces the life stories of four such men, who have been exiled from their parents, partners, children and friends by deportation. He explores how ‘Black Britons’ survive once they are returned to Jamaica and asks what their memories of poverty, racist policing and illegality reveal about contemporary Britain.

Based on years of research with deported people and their families, Deporting Black Britons presents stories of survival and hardship in both the UK and Jamaica. These intimate portraits testify to the damage wrought by violent borders, opening up wider questions about racism, belonging and deservingness in anti-immigrant times.

Local government in the UK is in crisis. It is now neither local in terms of the geography and populations of its principle units, nor does it truly govern in these areas. As this book reveals, over the previous 200 years local government has moved from a system in which local interests held governance over localities to one in which central government and national and multi-national agencies such as corporate businesses hold governance over local and community decision-making. These changes seriously undermine the important role that local government can play in liberal democracy in the UK. The book explains the nature of local government today and asks if there is any possibility of change.

Death in modern theatre offers a unique account of modern Western theatre, focusing on the ways in which dramatists and theatre-makers have explored historically informed ideas about death and dying in their work. It investigates the opportunities theatre affords to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion.

In a series of interrelated, mostly chronological, micronarratives beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending in the early twenty-first century, this book considers how and why death and dying are represented at certain historical moments using dramaturgy and aesthetics that challenge audiences’ conceptions, sensibilities, and sense-making faculties. It includes a mix of well-known and lesser-known plays from an international range of dramatists and theatre-makers, and offers original interpretations through close reading and performance analysis.

Cinematic ethnography proposes an interdisciplinary approach to theories and practices at the intersection of art, anthropology and cinema. The book proposes a model of collective aesthetics and collaborative filmmaking, going beyond the straightforward representation of reality that is so prevalent in visual anthropology and film studies.

This book explores the practices of filmmakers who utilise sensory collaborative approaches to convey diversity of knowledge. It affirms that the more we allow cinema to infuse audio-visual transmissions of reality, the more we might be able to experience the evoked reality. The book proposes a dialogic journey, inviting the reader to pause during the reading of the book to watch some of the author’s films, which exemplify the discussed theories and practices.

This innovative work from a practising filmmaker and visual anthropologist invites us to rethink how our cinematic practices, rather than aiming at factual representation and description, might instead contribute to a collaborative understanding of intercultural dialogue and shared knowledge. For those interested in visual anthropology, documentary film or broader questions about the nature of art and representation, Cinematic ethnography is a thought-provoking invitation to see – and tell – things differently.

The globe-trotting tales of five women who fought for the right to enjoy the wild places of the earth.

For millennia the ‘wild’ was a place heroic men went on epic quests. Women were prevented from joining them, either through physical control or powerful myths about what would happen if they ventured beyond the city wall or village boundary. So how did women claim their place in the remote and lovely parts of our planet?

In Wildly different, historian Sarah Lonsdale traces the lives of five women who fought for the right to work in, enjoy and help to save the earth’s wild places. We’ll meet Mina Hubbard, who outraged the exploration community when she stepped into a canoe in northern Labrador. Evelyn Cheesman, who became the first female keeper of insects at London Zoo. Dorothy Pilley, who shocked polite society by donning men’s climbing breeches. Ethel Haythornthwaite, who helped make the Peak District Britain’s first National Park. And Wangari Maathai, who started a movement to plant millions of trees across sub-Saharan Africa.

Drawing on interviews with Sir David Attenborough, Wangari Maathai’s daughter and others, Lonsdale recounts the women’s adventures across five continents. Evocative and inspiring, this book shows how women can be ‘wildly different’.

This book presents a new conceptual model for understanding the role of the media in the construction of public knowledge, belief and opinion in the context of a radically changed communications infrastructure. Drawing on a series of empirical studies conducted over nearly a decade, Happer deploys evidence of a ‘disconnect’ between neoliberal media and the public which is rooted in a disaffection with a mainstream political culture which has failed to deliver the societal outcomes promised. As people are pushed towards alternative digital sources, new communities of opinion are produced in ways which polarise publics and ultimately limit the potential for social change.

Offering an innovative and urgently needed new sociological analysis, this book is required reading for an inter-disciplinary field of media, journalism, and politics/IR which has largely abandoned questions of media power and public opinion management, as well as policymakers, science communicators and journalists.

A riveting history of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, a wave of British citizens who migrated to Australia and New Zealand after the Second World War.

Between the 1940s and 1970s, more than a million Britons migrated to Australia. They were the famous 'Ten Pound Poms' and this is their story.

The authors draw on a vast trove of letters, diaries and personal photographs, as well as hundreds of interviews with former migrants, to offer original insights into key historical themes. They explore people’s motivations for emigrating, gender relations and family dynamics, the clashing experience of the ‘very familiar and awfully strange’, homesickness and the personal and national identities of both settlers and returnees.

Filled with fascinating testimonies that shed light on migrant life histories, ‘Ten Pound Poms’ will engage readers interested in British and Australian migration history and intrigued about the power of migrant memories for individuals, families and nations.

Straight nation dissects the intricacies of nationalism in postcolonial Singapore and its entanglements with the governance of sexuality. Rejecting the romanticization of the nation as a pure bastion of belonging, the book theorizes nationalism as a force obsessed with continually generating threats, and excavates the alliance it has struck up with heteronormativity to produce a series of minoritized figures that contemporary identity claims can neither handle nor dispel.

Through an elegant exploration of a vast array of texts and cultural artifacts, the book argues that the relationship between sexuality and nation is instrumental in producing multiple queered figures who are displaced from the national imaginary. Dwelling on what is often taken as conventional wisdom, Straight nation demonstrates how queerness can be xenologized under the sign of the postcolonial nation and turned into a technology of “race”, gender and class in the right contexts.

The book delivers a sharp riposte to narrow identity politics and outlines in detail how the governance of sexual expression functions as a powerful mechanism to shape the lives of many – including, as unlikely as it may seem, heterosexual people. In the face of the far-reaching effects of heteronormativity coupled with nationalism, Straight nation presents a compelling argument for an expansive, non-identarian political critique capable of dismantling the deeply entrenched force of heteronormativity in postcolonial Singapore, and the detritus of nationalism along with it.

A writer's quest to understand the deep past and uncertain future of his homeland.

After inheriting the miner's safety lamp that belonged to his great-grandfather, Jake Morris-Campbell sets out on a pilgrimage across his homeland. Travelling from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral, he asks what new ways might be made through the old north.

This region, a hub of early Christian Britain and later strongly defined by industry and class, now faces an uncertain future. But it remains a unique and starkly beautiful part of the country, with a deep history that is intimately entwined with the idea of Englishness. Jake’s journey along the ‘Camino of the North’ sees him explore the shifting nature of individual and regional identity across thirteen-hundred years of social change. At the same time, it challenges him to reconsider his own calling as a writer and how it relates to the lives of the people he meets along the way.

Between the salt and the ash asks what stories the North East can tell about itself in the wake of Christianity and coal. Rejecting the damaging trope of ‘left behind’ communities, Jake uncovers neglected seams of culture and history, while offering a heartfelt celebration of the place he calls hyem.

Islamophobia is one of the most misunderstood and pernicious forms of racism in Britain. But how do those committed to challenging Islamophobia understand it? And what does this mean for their practices ‘on the ground’?

Islamophobia, anti-racism and the British left combines first-hand accounts from activists and community workers across two British cities with sociological theory, critically interrogating Islamophobia’s relationship to ‘race’, racial capitalism and other modalities of racism. Setting this discussion against some of the most pertinent political shifts in Britain in recent years – from the resurgence of left nationalism to Black Lives Matter – the book assesses the limits of recent attempts to think about and tackle Islamophobia, and considers the possibilities of an alternative approach from and for the anti-racist left.

Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the ‘sexual revolution’ in mid-twentieth century England. Rather than focusing on ‘Swinging London’, the book reveals the transformations in social life that took place in school playgrounds, local cinemas, and suburban bedrooms.
Based on over 300 personal testimonies, Teenage Intimacies traces the everyday experiences of teenage girls, illuminating how romance, sex and intimacy shaped their young lives. The book shows how sex became embedded in ideas about ‘growing up’ and explores how heterosexuality influenced young women’s social lives and vice versa. It offers new explanations of why sexual mores shifted in this period, revealing the pivotal role that young women played in changing sexual values, cultures and practices in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

This book is a study of statelessness in the period of the Second World War. It breaks new ground by focusing not on Europe, but on the Asian and Pacific theatres of the conflict. This perspective enables us to go beyond Hannah Arendt’s classic account of statelessness in her Origins of Totalitarianism.
To her, statelessness was the product of a failed European nation-state system. We find a very different story when we examine the history of stateless people, many of them Jews, fleeing to Asia from Europe. In Asia, we see that being stateless was not a uniform experience, but a variety of possibilities reflecting the political structure of the states and cities in which refugees found shelter. We find too that stateless people managed to enter the political realm long before they reached the threshold of citizenship.

At a time when far, radical, and extreme-right politics are becoming increasingly mainstream globally – sometimes with deadly consequences – research in these fields is essential to understand the most effective ways to combat these dangerous ideologies. Yet engaging with texts and movements that do physical and verbal violence raises a number of urgent ethical issues. Until recently, this has remained understudied, as scholarship on the far right rarely delves explicitly and critically into the ethics of research.

This book seeks to remedy this significant gap in an otherwise extensive and growing literature. Originating from a workshop series in 2020, in which an international group of academics at various career stages shared the ethical challenges and best practices they had developed in their research, this edited collection draws together insights from these ongoing conversations, offering urgent critical reflections on key ethical issues.

A ground-breaking biography of a cult British novelist.

The extraordinary twentieth-century writer Barbara Comyns led a life as captivating as the narratives she spun. This pioneering biography reveals the journey of a woman who experienced hardship and single-motherhood before the age of thirty but went on to publish a sequence of novels unique in the English language.

Comyns turned her hand to many jobs in order to survive, from artist’s model to piano restorer. Unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs, spies and high society. While working as a housekeeper in her mid-thirties, Comyns began transforming the bleak episodes of her life into compelling fictions streaked with surrealism and deadpan humour. The Vet’s Daughter (1959), championed by Graham Greene, brought her fame, although her use of the gothic and macabre divided readers and reviewers.

This biography excavates Comyns’s life and reclaims her fiction, providing a timely reassessment of her literary contribution. It sheds new light on a remarkable author who deftly captured the complexities of human life.

An illuminating look at the world of cleanfluencers that asks why the burden of housework still falls on women.

Housework is good for you. Housework sparks joy. Housework is beautiful. Housework is glamorous. Housework is key to a happy family. Housework shows that you care. Housework is women’s work.

Social media is flooded with images of the perfect housewife. TikTok and Instagram ‘cleanfluencers’ produce endless photos and videos of women cleaning, tidying and putting things right. Figures such as Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch have placed housework, with its promise of a life of love and contentment, at the centre of self-care and positive thinking.

And yet housework remains one of the world’s most unequal institutions. Women, especially poorer women and women of colour, do most low-paid and unpaid domestic labour. In The return of the housewife, Emma Casey asks why these inequalities matter and why they persist after a century of dramatic advances in women’s rights. She offers a powerful call to challenge the prevailing myths around housework and the ‘naturally competent’ woman homemaker.

The first book in the ‘Biography of a novel’ series offers a compelling account of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece.

The fourth and best-known of Virginia Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway is a modernist masterpiece that has remained popular since its publication in 1925. Its dual narratives follow a day in the life of wealthy housewife Clarissa Dalloway and shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, capturing their inner worlds with a vividness that has rarely been equalled.

Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel offers new readers a lively introduction to this enduring classic, while providing Woolf lovers with a wealth of information about the novel’s writing, publication and reception. It follows Woolf’s process from the first stirrings in her diary through her struggles to create what was quickly recognised as a major advance in prose fiction. It then traces the novel’s remarkable legacy to the present day.

Woolf wrote in her diary that she wanted her novel ‘to give life & death, sanity & insanity… to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense.’ Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a novel reveals how she achieved this ambition, creating a book that will be read by generations to come.

An imaginative investigation into a historical crime that sheds new light on Jewish history.

In 1734 a pedlar turned smuggler named Jacob Harris slit the throats of three people in a pub in Sussex. This triple-murder, for which he was hanged and gibbeted, remains the most violent crime ever committed by a British Jew. Yet today it is all but forgotten.

In The Jewish pedlar, Tony Kushner goes in search of the enigmatic Harris. Digging into a remarkable range of sources, from law records and newspaper reports to ballads and folktales, he follows the traces of Harris’s legend across three hundred years of British history. In doing so, he reconstructs the world of Jewish pedlars and criminals across many continents. The lives these figures eked out at the margins of society paint a picture of persistent antisemitism – but also of remarkable integration.

Intellectually bold and deeply humane, The Jewish pedlar takes a new, grassroots approach to the history of Jews in the modern world, shedding light on everyday lives from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust and beyond.

The unsettling stories of how Egyptian mummies came to be held in British and French museums.

We all know what a mummy is – or do we? In Mummified, Angela Stienne explores the little-known stories behind the ancient Egyptian remains displayed in British and French museums.

Taking the reader on a journey between Egypt, Paris and London, Stienne exposes a murky world of grave-robbing, theft and callously treated human remains. Mummies have been unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and even eaten for their supposed health-giving properties. But does the fact they are thousands of years old mean they can be treated as objects, or do we owe them the same respect we would any other human body?

Investigating matters of life and death and the ethics of collection and display, Mummified offers a fresh perspective on these ancient bodies, which have fascinated Europeans for centuries.

A hard-hitting exposé that reveals how rich countries outsource the climate crisis to poor ones.

Around the world, leading economies are announcing significant success in the struggle against climate change. Heads of government proclaim their commitment to tackling the crisis, pointing to data that shows the progress they have made. Yet the atmosphere is still warming at a record rate. Are we being deceived?

In Carbon colonialism, Laurie Parsons exposes how rich countries cook the books on climate change – by outsourcing it to the global South. Conducting first-hand research across Asia, he reveals how exporting emissions and waste allows states and corporations to maintain a clean, green image. Meanwhile, landfills expand and droughts and floods intensify, with devastating effects on the world’s most vulnerable communities.

Technical fixes and creative accounting are a mirage. The real obstacles to effective action are deeply embedded in the political systems and structures of our society. Parsons calls on readers to wake up from the fairy tales of greenwashing and ethical consumerism and end carbon colonialism now.

Featuring a foreword from Annie Mac

An inspiring memoir-manifesto from one of the UK’s leading DJs.

In Welcome to the club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of her thirty-year music career, with insights from some famous friends.

As one of the Haçienda’s pioneering female DJs, Paulette has reached the pinnacle of the music industry, performing for crowds of thousands worldwide. She offers a remarkable perspective from a Black woman’s viewpoint, arguing that despite dance music’s core values of peace, love, unity and respect, it remains a world rife with exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. Yet, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space teeming with powerful women.

Part personal memoir, part call to action, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while honouring the often invisible women who keep the rhythm alive.

Werner Conn, born in 1928, has fond memories of his early childhood in Berlin. Following Kristallnacht in 1938, Werner’s father was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but his mother managed to get him released after six months. Life became very difficult, and Werner was sent to the UK on the Kindertransport. He spent his first two weeks in England at a Scout camp on the South Downs. He discovered after the war that his parents and younger brother had been deported to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia on his fifteenth birthday.

In 1945, Werner obtained a National Certificate in mechanical engineering and began his career at the English Electric Company. He married Elisabeth in 1958, and they settled down in Lytham St Annes with their daughter, Heather.

Werner’s book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.

Peter Mittler was born in Vienna in April 1930 and witnessed the Anschluss in 1938 when life changed overnight for Jews. He escaped to England on the Kindertransport in January 1939 and stayed with a sponsor family in London. Peter’s parents had also managed to get to England, but his father was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man for 9 months during the war.

Peter joined the British Army in 1949 and then studied Psychology at Cambridge. He went on to spend 14 years as Director of the Hester Adrian Research Centre (HARC) at the University of Manchester and Peter’s leadership in the development of policy and provision for adults and children with intellectual disabilities was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 1981.

Peter’s book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.

Danny Herman was born in 1935 in Königsberg in East Prussia. As the Nazis were rounding up Jews, Danny’s father managed to escape to England in July 1939. He travelled to the Kitchener Camp in Kent, which helped refugees secure visas for safer places. Danny and his mother arrived in England just three days before war was declared in 1939, and his father was later sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man.

Danny went on to become a successful runner, competing in many international athletics events and volunteering in many roles, including at the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Danny’s detailed memories of arriving in England, initially at the seaside in Kent and then moving to Manchester, create a vivid picture of life-changing events as experienced by a young child.

Danny’s book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.

Tomi Komoly, born in 1936 in Budapest, was the only child of a loving Jewish family. Tomi describes the ordeals endured by Hungarian Jews under the Horthy regime and Nazi occupation. He provides an account of his survival after he was forced to move to a constricted ‘yellow star house’ and eventually found shelter with a Hungarian family with his mother. Tomi’s father was forcefully conscripted into the Hungarian Labour Service and did not survive.

Post-war, facing the oppression of the communist regime in Hungary, Tomi fled to Vienna, then moved to England having secured a scholarship to study engineering. He married Gill, built a successful career in engineering and settled in Manchester with his family. Tomi received the British Empire Medal for services to Holocaust education.

Tomi’s book is part of the My Voice book collection, a stand-alone project of The Fed, the leading Jewish social care charity in Manchester, dedicated to preserving the life stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. The oral history, which is recorded and transcribed, captures their entire lives from before, during and after the war years. The books are written in the words of the survivor so that future generations can always hear their voice. The My Voice book collection is a valuable resource for Holocaust awareness and education.