Why does the monarchy matter? In Running the Family Firm: How the Monarchy Manages Its Image and Our Money (Manchester UP, 2021), Laura Clancy, a Lecturer in Media and Lancaster University, considers the British monarchy in the context of contemporary financialised capitalism, exposing the tensions and contradictions between the public face of royalty and t ... Show More
Yesterday
Jacqueline Riding, "Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London" (Profile Books, 2025)
Welcome to the hard streets: working-class London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile, 2026) by Dr. Jacqueline Riding. Charlie Chaplin rose from the hard streets of Edwardian London to wor ... Show More
1h 3m
Feb 3
David McCrone, "Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
Scotland is a nation that has undergone significant changes over the last 50 years or so. This is, of course, true of much of the Western world but, as David McCrone shows in his Changing Scotland: Society, Politics and Identity (Edinburgh UP, 2025), these change have had particu ... Show More
1h 48m
Jan 31
Peter Stansky, "The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the enti ... Show More
43m 9s
Jul 2023
Capitalism, The State, and How We Got Here with Christian Parenti
<p class="MsoNormal">Elements of capitalism have existed throughout history — in institutions like markets, class relations, ownership laws, credit systems, etc. But they were never dominant until they came together, escaping the isolated, laboratory conditions in which they once ... Show More
1h 9m
Sep 2021
How did the British royals survive WW1?
While many European royals faced abdications and revolutions during the First World War, the British monarchy not only survived the conflict, but was strengthened by it. Historian Heather Jones discusses her new book, For King and Country, which explores the royal family’s role d ... Show More
1h 8m
Nov 2023
Writing the History of Money and Monetary Policy
What do the histories of currency and monetary policy tell us about societies at large, political structures, and cultures? Ekaterina Pravilova and Rebecca Spang tackle these questions, respectively, in two important books that examine the history of the Russian ruble from the ti ... Show More
58m 24s