Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite · Ladders last a long time: Reading Raphael Samuel lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Taking up his post in October, Professor Cook will lead and expand the study and teaching of LGBTQ+ history at Oxford University, after 18 years at Birkbeck College where he led the Gender and Sexuality Studies MA programme, and directed the Raphael
Mansfield College, University of Oxford, is delighted to announce the appointment of the UK’s first permanently endowed Professorship in LGBTQ+ History, in association with the Faculty of History. The renowned historian, Professor Matt Cook, will become the first Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexualities.
This work offers an account of the heroes and villains, legends and foibles of the four nations that inhabit the British Isles. Raphael Samuel is interested by the face that traditions can disappear no less abruptly than they were invented. How is it, he asks, that the Scots have lost interest in a British narrative of which they were once a central protagonist? Why is the celebration of Britons thriving today just as its object has become problematic? The book conveys the mutability of national conceits. Samuels calls as witness numerous authorities - Bede and Gerald of Barri, Macaulay and Stubbs, Shakespeare and Dickens, Lord Reith and Raymond Williams, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn - each of whom sought to renew the sense of national identity by means of an acute sense of the past. A sequel to Theatres of Memory , the book is a study of the way nations use their past to lend meaning to the present and future.