Russomania: Russian Culture and the Creation of British Modernism provides a new account of modernist literature's emergence in Britain. British writers played a central role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture during the early twentieth century, and their writing was transformed by the encounter. This study restores the thick history of that moment, by analyzing networks of dissemination and reception to recover the role of neglected as well as canonical figures, and institutions as well as individuals. The dominant account of British modernism privileges a Francophile genealogy, but the turn-of-the century debate about the future of British writing was a triangular debate, a debate not only between French and English models, but between French, English, and Russian models. Francophile modernists associated Russian literature, especially the Tolstoyan novel, with an uncritical immersion in 'life' at the expense of a mastery of style, and while individual works might be admired, Russian literature as a whole was represented as a dangerous model for British writing. This supposed danger was closely bound up with the politics of the period, and this book investigates how Russian culture was deployed in the close relationships between writers, editors, and politicians who made up the early twentieth-century intellectual class--the British intelligentsia. Russomania argues that the most significant impact of Russian culture is not to be found in stylistic borrowings between canonical authors, but in the shaping of the major intellectual questions of the period: the relation between language and action, writer and audience, and the work of art and lived experience. The resulting account brings an occluded genealogy of early modernism to the fore, with a different arrangement of protagonists, different critical values, and stronger lines of connection to the realist experiments of the Victorian past, and the anti-formalism and revived romanticism of the 1930s and 1940s future.

This data-rich sociological study uses everything from census figures to Who's Who to analyze how, over 125 years, the British elite have used status, elite education, and powerful social networks to shape politics and cultural values. But what happens when elites begin to change--in what they look like, value, and how they position themselves?

A genealogist’s practical guide to researching family history online while avoiding inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading information. The internet has revolutionized family history research—every day new records and resources are placed online and new methods of sharing research and communicating become available. Never before has it been so easy to research family history and to gain a better understanding of who we are and where we came from. But, as British genealogist Chris Paton demonstrates in this straightforward, practical guide, while the internet is an enormous asset, it is also something to be wary of. Researchers need to take a cautious approach to the information they acquire on the web. Where did the original material come from? Has it been accurately reproduced? Why was it put online? What has been left out and what is still to come? As he leads researchers through the multitude of resources that are now accessible online with an emphasis on UK and Ireland sites, Chris Paton helps to answer these questions. He shows what the internet can and cannot do—and he warns against the various traps researchers can fall into along the way.

The University of London celebrates the 150th anniversary of its first Charter in 1986, and this history has been produced in commemoration of the occasion. One of the leading universities in the world, and the largest universities in the United Kingdom, the University of London is a many-headed federation of different institutions. This sketch of its developing shape, structure and role, incorporates many well--chosen illustrations encapsulating the range of activities and institutions constituting a great federal university.Attention is paid to the earlier teaching institutions, especially the medical shoos attached to London's hospitals. The activities of the expanding metropolitan and imperial university are surveyed throughout Victorian times. The major reconstruction of 1900 which began the organic link between the various colleges forming the federal university is covered, and all the subsequent changes of the twentieth century are outlined. The background to the present difficult period of 'cuts' and restructuring is indicated.This illustrated history is a lively and well-informed overview of a complex institution -- or, more properly, an interwoven series of institutions and activities. It should prove of interest and value to all the many students, teachers and other members of the University of London, past and present, as well as to those who seek to understand the increasingly crucial role of knowledge in modern society.

Rebelling against Victorian religious and social strictures, occultist Aleister Crowley, soldier J. F. C. Fuller, and poet Victor Neuburg were active contributors and participants in the British secularist movement at the dawn of the twentieth century. Friendship in Doubt examines how the Agnostic movement inspired and introduced them to each other as foundational figures in the new religious movement of Thelema.