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Articles by Susan Pedersen
Keep off the grass
In 1990, Noël Annan, then in his early seventies, published Our Age, a study – part memoir, part history – of those members of his generation who, as he put it, ‘make their times significant and form opinion’. His contingent wasn’t an ‘intelligentsia’ in some imagined enragé French sense; its members, almost all of them men produced by the public schools and Oxbridge, had not rejected their culture, institutions and class. They had their weaknesses, Annan admitted.
Worker, Hipster, Banker
Afriendly ghost hovers over The Modern British City, the collaborative project of a crack team of historians of urban life. H.J. (Jim) Dyos died in 1978, still in his fifties, but as the UK’s first professor of urban history and still more through his enthusiastic collaborations and magpie methods, he indelibly shaped the study of city life.
Burn This Letter: Love and Trouble in a Marriage of Four
The day after nineteen-year-old Betty Bulwer-Lytton, daughter of the Earl of Lytton, accepted a proposal of marriage from the rising Conservative politician Gerald Balfour, she received a different kind of proposal, a letter from a woman she barely knew, proposing ‘an intimate woman friendship’. Lady Frances Balfour, daughter of the Duke of Argyll, was married to Gerald’s younger brother Eustace. But, she explained to Betty, for the past five years she had been in love with Gerald.
Men explain Epstein to me
I’m not on social media, in part because the level of my rage and anxiety about American politics doesn’t need to get any higher. But I do feel obliged to keep an eye on the polity: I read the papers, go occasionally to demonstrations and, each morning, as I walk the twenty blocks from my apartment to Columbia to teach my classes, listen to news podcasts. Which means I spent the first week of February listening to podcasts about Jeffrey Epstein.
Ownership Struggle
The Second World War is often described as a total war – that is, a war which blurred the divide between front and home front, colony and metropole, women and men, soldier and civilian. But if we shift our attention from Dunkirk and Normandy eastwards – to the war Germany unleashed against Poland and then, from 1941, the Soviet Union – total war seems an understatement.
Slim for Britain
Book titles are like city buses: they bunch up and arrive in packs. When historians were obsessed with identity, collective nouns proliferated: Citizens (1989), Britons (1992), Commoners (1993), Aristocrats (1994). Foucault prompted genealogies of ‘isms’: orientalism, internationalism, imperialism, globalism, neoliberalism. But for historians, nothing beats the gerund: the verb made noun, process as subject – this is what we do.
Dining at the White House
Ralph Bunche died aged 67 because he chain-smoked, slept too little, was diabetic and worked too much. It didn’t help that he spent decades yoked successively to four demanding Scandinavians. Bunche was a brilliant young professor at Howard University, making his name as an Africanist, when Gunnar Myrdal hired him to work on his Carnegie-funded study of race in America.
Do fight, don’t kill
John Stuart Mill approved of dissent. In ‘On Liberty’, he argued that vigorous debate improved society and that unconventional behaviour lit the path to freer and more fulfilling lives. He urged the widest tolerance for opinion, speech and even what he charmingly called ‘experiments of living’. Without such pinpricks, he argued, like-minded majorities would grow intolerant and democracies would slide into despotism. Mill made resisting social norms a social duty of its own.
Flocculent and Feculent
Of the many hardships visited on New York in the first months of the pandemic, food shortages weren’t among them. Supply chains held. Cleaning products vanished from supermarket shelves but there was still plenty to eat. The system showed its tensile strength, its eerie ability to deliver food of all kinds even to a population pinned in place, unequally able to purchase it.
Worth the Upbringing
On 18 June 1914, Sylvia Pankhurst was released from Holloway prison. She was in bad shape. A year earlier the Liberal government had passed the so-called Cat and Mouse Act as a response to the hunger strikes undertaken by militant suffragettes in prison.
The fear of needles · LRB 1 September 2005
If, like me, you are young enough to have been immunised against diphtheria and polio in the mass public health campaigns of the postwar period, but old enough to have known victims of these childhood scourges, it may be hard to think of vaccination except within a narrative of progress.
I want to love it
Was Eric Hobsbawm interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never without a book, whether bound for a tutorial or the local A&E, for decades he disappeared off for tramping holidays or conferences anywhere from Catalonia to Cuba the moment term ended.
Mothers were different
In 1894, Mary Molloy married Jimmy O’Meara, a Liverpool docker. She was 30 and he was 37. Mary may well have fallen in love, but the marriage made economic sense too. Although she had worked since girlhood, she earned only 12 shillings a week – just above the average women’s wage at the turn of the century, but not really enough for her to live comfortably on her own. And, given the limited employments available to women, Mary knew she had little hope of ever getting more.
Michael Apted’s Flawed but Brilliant Epic of British Social Life
The education of Michael Apted. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark November 2, 2020 Scenes from the Up series. (Courtesy of the BBC) Michael Apted’s great Up series, about a cohort of English children, wasn’t conceived as a series at all.
After the Victorians
After the Victorians: Private Conscience and Public Duty in Modern Britain ISBN | Quantity: Shopping Cart Summary Items: Routledge & CRC Press eBooks are available through VitalSource. The free VitalSource Bookshelf® application allows you to access to your eBooks whenever and wherever you choose. Mobile/eReaders – Download the Bookshelf mobile app at VitalSource.com or from the iTunes or Android store to access your eBooks from your mobile device or eReader.
Susan Pedersen and Joanna Biggs
Your browser does not support the audio element. Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey. Image shows Rita Tushingham and Dora Bryan in A Taste of Honey (1961), directed by Tony Richardson (PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo).
Ruin it your own way
When Shelagh Delaney, all of 19, started writing A Taste of Honey, it had only two characters: Jo, the 15-year-old Salford school-leaver whose choices and chances structure the story, and her forty-year-old often skint but always cadging mother, Helen. Other characters were added later. Peter, the louche businessman with a ‘wallet full of reasons’ to lure Helen offstage and into a brief marriage for the play’s middle sections.
Susan Pedersen · Suitable Heroes: Home from the War · LRB 25 February 2010
Whatever sort of welcome the former Eighth Army driver Maurice Merritt was hoping for when he walked out of the Second World War and in through his front door, it probably wasn’t the note on the kitchen table that greeted him: ‘Make a cup of cocoa if you like and there’s a tin of pilchards in the larder if you feel peckish. Joan.’ Of course, Merritt was luckier than thousands of his comrades: he didn’t find his home blown to bits or his wife sitting cosily by the fire with another man.
Shock Cities · LRB 22 December 2019
Please sign in to read the full article. Login These two books will be read, inevitably, as studies of neoliberalism, a world order – and a word – that has snuck up on us in the last few decades. I say ‘snuck up’ for a reason. I remember the 1980s, when our antagonists were identifiable and embodied: the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors.
Is Our Food Culture Killing Us?
How our food culture is killing us. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Frans Snyders, Kitchen Table With Game and Vegetables, ca. 1635–40. I was born and grew up mostly in Japan, the second of four children of missionary parents who went there in 1955 to convert the Japanese to Lutheranism. Instead, the Japanese converted my family to better eating.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Eric Hobsbawm’ by Richard J. Evans · LRB 18 April 2019
Was Eric Hobsbawm interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never without a book, whether bound for a tutorial or the local A&E, for decades he disappeared off for tramping holidays or conferences anywhere from Catalonia to Cuba the moment term ended.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Edith Cavell’ by Diana Souhami · LRB 14 April 2011
Nurses are tough subjects for biography. Their ethos of compassion and, sometimes, self-sacrifice can lead to hagiography or – when times change – invite satire. It’s hard to forget Lytton Strachey’s portrait of Florence Nightingale, her health broken by her exertions in the Crimea, issuing breathless directives on sanitary reform to the secretary of war, Sidney Herbert, and harrying him into an early grave.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Rise Up, Women’ by Diane Atkinson and ‘Hearts and Minds’ by Jane Robinson · LRB 30 August 2018
The wars and revolutions that took place a century ago were so vastly consequential for peoples and nations that historians have had to deal with centenaries queued up like planes coming into Heathrow: 1914, the Easter Rising, the Battle of the Somme, the Balfour Declaration, the Bolshevik Revolution, not to mention the Armistice, the Treaty of Versailles and the Spanish flu epidemic still circling overhead.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Women against the Vote’ by Julia Bush · LRB 20 March 2008
Poor Lord Cromer. The great imperial proconsul returned to England in 1907 after more than two decades governing Egypt to find his homeland awash with suffragists and socialists, Irish nationalists and trade unionists. The swelling women’s suffrage movement especially appalled him. Few things were more likely to undermine the British Empire, he was convinced, than the entry of women into the Westminster Parliament.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Bread for All’ by Chris Renwick · LRB 8 February 2018
If I were asked to name the man who did most to shape the welfare state in modern Britain, I just might give the palm to Sir Alfred Watson. He would be an unconventional choice. Short, bald, unassuming, more at home with numbers than people, Watson is well and truly forgotten.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Demobbed’ by Alan Allport and ‘The Flyer’ by Martin Francis · LRB 25 February 2010
Whatever sort of welcome the former Eighth Army driver Maurice Merritt was hoping for when he walked out of the Second World War and in through his front door, it probably wasn’t the note on the kitchen table that greeted him: ‘Make a cup of cocoa if you like and there’s a tin of pilchards in the larder if you feel peckish. Joan.’ Of course, Merritt was luckier than thousands of his comrades: he didn’t find his home blown to bits or his wife sitting cosily by the fire with another man.
Susan Pedersen · Super-shallow-fragile-ego-Trump-UR-atrocious · LRB 16 February 2017
Most of the signs at the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday were hand-lettered, idiosyncratic, fierce, personal and often very funny.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘White World Order, Black Power Politics’ by Robert Vitalis · LRB 20 October 2016
Robert Vitalis tells a great story about how he came to write this book. Some years ago, sitting in the Clark University library avoiding grading his students’ final exams, he pulled an old history of the university off the shelf. Clark played a key role in the birth of the field of international relations in the two decades before the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development.
Destined to Disappear
Robert Vitalis tells a great story about how he came to write this book. Some years ago, sitting in the Clark University library avoiding grading his students’ final exams, he pulled an old history of the university off the shelf. Clark played a key role in the birth of the field of international relations in the two decades before the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development.
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The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire
Conquer & Divide The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire By Susan Pedersen Oxford University Press 571pp £22.99 order from our bookshop When the victorious Allies sat down to decide on the terms of the peace settlement in the early months of 1919, they were faced with a dilemma.
Did the League of Nations ultimately fail?
The First World War threw the imperial order into crisis. New states emerged, while German and Ottoman territories fell to the allies who wanted to keep their acquisitions. But at the Paris Peace conference of 1919, the allies agreed reluctantly to govern their new conquests according to international and humanitarian norms and under ‘mandate’ from the League of Nations.
At least we worried
In the explosion of recent books about the First World War – many of them excellent, almost all packed with narrative excitement, but not all breaking new ground – Isabel Hull’s stands out. There is no human interest, no lice and dysentery, but it is as gripping and important as any. It is concerned not with the experience of war but with legal arguments over its prosecution, and it began as a modest research project aimed at understanding the uses made of the doctrine of military necessity.
Susan Pedersen reviews ‘Bodily Matters’ by Nadja Durbach · LRB 1 September 2005
If, like me, you are young enough to have been immunised against diphtheria and polio in the mass public health campaigns of the postwar period, but old enough to have known victims of these childhood scourges, it may be hard to think of vaccination except within a narrative of progress.
You’re only interested in Hitler, not me
Mark Peel organises his serviceable authorised biography of Shirley Williams around an ostensible conundrum. Why didn’t Williams achieve more politically? Why did the polarising, hectoring Margaret Thatcher, rather than the consensus-seeking, appealing Williams, become Britain’s first woman prime minister? This is a common question.
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