Rosalind Mitchison

Rosalind Mitchison a professor of social history at the University of Edinburgh, is the author of A History of Scotland and editor of The Roots of Nationalism. Union of the Crowns and Union of the Kingdoms is to be published later this year by Edward Arnold.

Out of it

Rosalind Mitchison, 5 April 1990

These two writers are both concerned with the old and the elderly, but to very different effect. Minois presents a repertoire of comments on the old, from the ancient world to the 16th century: most comments are hostile. Girning about the disagreeable features of the old seems to have been a recognised literary form. Writers experimented with new nasty similes or enlarged upon a repertoire of unpleasant features. Cicero wrote a whole book about the old, ostensibly to rebut the standard criticisms, but at the same time admitted that he did not believe his arguments. He appears to have confined his observation of the old to old men. Horace by contrast went overboard on how disgusting old women were. The usual comments of Latin writers on the old was that they were dirty, sallow, stinking; their dominant mental attributes avarice, stupidity and concupiscence.

Making and Breaking

Rosalind Mitchison, 21 December 1989

Nobody could call Frank Honigsbaum’s book ‘user friendly’. Some reasons for its indigestibility are inherent in the topic: the moves, some effective, most frustrated, by civil servants and politicians, towards the creation of the British National Health Service. But there are also self-inflicted handicaps to ready comprehensibility: the author has done his best to impede communication. His structure means that he tracks through the period 1936-48 several times and with the year not always discernible, for he takes the plans of civil servants for general practice as one story, for hospital services as another, and then looks at the discussions of the financial issues. Much of the writing is in the form of initials, and the table of these given is not comprehensive. A further shorthand leads to the suppression of many of the small words that ease communication, the ‘the’s’, ‘that’s’ and ‘to’s’, so that at times the prose reads like headlines. Some sentences have got away with hanging participles, mistakes in number or misuse of subjunctive tenses. This is hard going.

Knowing more

Rosalind Mitchison, 14 September 1989

Victor Kiernan is here presenting essays produced over the last 45 years: the texts are only occasionally given recent additions. The topics include three essays on literature but are otherwise historical: on English patterns of protest, the expansion of literacy among working men, political aspects of religion, and Communist activity in the Thirties and after. The writing is elegant and, mostly, cool.

Nimbying

Rosalind Mitchison, 31 August 1989

Anyone who has kept hens knows that these unattractive creatures make a point of brutality to any among them sick or weak. Some other ‘social’ animals share this antisocial tendency. The human species has a wide pattern of response to distress, but under the influence of moral or religious pressures, or of medical fancies, it is as capable as hens of behaving badly to those least able to withstand unkindness. The story of organised care and welfare includes a large number of instances of what intrinsically appear as policies of systematic mental or physical cruelty.

Women and children first

Rosalind Mitchison, 1 June 1989

Geography is about maps and history is about chaps – someone must have been very pleased with himself for producing this snappy definition. But traditionally history wasn’t simply about chaps: it was about chaps in power, the men who ran politics, the Church, the banks, and any other institution considered important. Women, and even children, might be allowed onto the scene for dynastic reasons. Women might also, if celibate, make it to sainthood. In the late 19th century it was recognised that there was also labour history, almost entirely male, and a kind of social history based on the households and concerns of noble families. Only recently has the greater part of the human race, women and children, made it into history, and even now there are historians and politicians striving to keep them out.’

Joining them

Conrad Russell, 24 January 1985

Goodwin Wharton is a fascinating and amusing figure, but he is sui generis: the same things which make his flirtations with the occult such amusing reading also make it difficult to compare his...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences