Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite teaches history at UCL. She is co-editor of The Neoliberal Age?, about Britain since the 1970s. Women and the Miners’ Strike, co-authored with Natalie Thomlinson, is due in October.

Ladders last a long time: Reading Raphael Samuel

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 23 May 2024

Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century:

Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was...

Indoor Sport: Mr Sex

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 22 February 2024

Alex Comfort​ was exhausting. After meeting him, the pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson swapped notes. ‘If we could learn to produce on a 24-hour level the way he does, I think we’d probably have it made,’ Johnson said. ‘Five or six hours is all I can stand,’ Masters replied. ‘I end up out of breath while he’s...

‘We’ve messed up, boys’: Bad Blood

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 16 November 2023

Gary Webster​ was seventeen when he was told he had Aids and might have just two or three years to live. It was early 1983 and he was at Treloar’s, a boarding school for children with haemophilia and other disabling conditions. He had to give the news to his parents himself. In his written statement to the Infected Blood Inquiry he said the ‘worst thing’ was the stigma. He...

No Place for Grumblers: Ready for the Bomb?

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 27 July 2023

In​ 1955, William Strath was asked to produce a report for the government on the possible impact of nuclear conflict on the UK. Strath, a former tax inspector, economic planner and experienced civil servant, came to the conclusion that Britain was unlikely to emerge from a nuclear attack as a functioning society, never mind as a nation able to wage war. The United States had recently tested...

Puny Rump: Sick Notes

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 13 April 2023

The analogy between the welfare state and the sick note ignores the fact that, unlike the sick note, the welfare state has been consistently popular with the public – despite the carping of the Daily Mail. Grassroots critics of welfare have rarely called for cuts but overwhelmingly for expansion: for the system to live up to the high hopes invested in it.

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