Angus Calder

Angus Calder Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the 15th Century to the 1780s will be published in March. He is the author of The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945.

Letter

Bad

11 March 1993

David Townsend (Letters, 10 June) may well be on firm ground when he challenges my suggestion that approved children’s fiction incites to violence. It could be that Stevenson, Richmal Crompton and Ransome were so successful as children’s writers because they saw very clearly that children had wicked propensities and addressed them on this basis, diverting them from real violence into morally tolerable...
Letter

The Sadist

12 March 1992

I’m surprised that Doris Lessing should feel drawn to defend Sir Richard Burton so hotly against remarks in my review of Frank McLynn’s careful biography (Letters, 9 April). I did not ‘find it remarkable that he continues to attract biographers.’ I wrote, on the contrary, that the complexity of his personality ‘will always draw biographers towards him’.There are other signs in her letter...
Letter

Distaste for Leavis

11 October 1990

David Craig writes as movingly and candidly about his personal relationship with F.R. Leavis as Paul Addison, in the same issue, does about his with A.J.P. Taylor. But isn’t the contrast between their two mentors illuminating? Taylor never sought to create a ‘Taylorite’ school. His verdicts on other historians never had the force of anathema.When a group of us arrived at King’s College, Cambridge,...
Letter

The Clearances

22 January 1987

SIR: I respect the feelings which animate David Craig’s objections (Letters, 19 February) to the countenance I give to T.C. Smout’s view of the Highland Clearances in his Century of the Scottish People. I have many friends, Gaels and Lowlanders, who share his outrage, and so do I, when I contemplate certain aspects and incidents of the process. In John Clare’s Northamptonshire the transformation...

Pieces about Angus Calder in the LRB

The brief possibility of a different kind of history

Julian Symons, 12 September 1991

A myth now, what is that? ‘A purely fictitious narrative embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena,’ my Shorter Oxford says, adding: ‘Often used...

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Kiss Count

John Campbell, 19 April 1984

The spectacle of members of the upper class setting out solemnly and in a spirit of scientific research to study the lower classes in their natural habitat is a peculiarly Thirties phenomenon....

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Freaks of Empire

V.G. Kiernan, 16 July 1981

‘Revolutionary empire’ is a bold term which may be taken in various senses. Like the Roman and Arab before it, but on a grander scale, the British Empire was a powerful force in...

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