News
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‘Can You See the Real Me’: Bank Holidays and Quadrophenia, by Professor Matthew Worley
August Bank Holiday means it’s time for my annual viewing of Quadrophenia (1979), the film built around The Who’s 1973 LP of the same name. Jimmy, a young mod from London, prepares for a beano in Brighton, travelling to the… Continue reading
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Summer Weather and Winchester’s Patron Saint, by Ruth J. Salter
If you are anything like me you will be thinking that after what felt like a prolonged grey, cold winter it feels like we should’ve turned a corner into summer. I suppose it’s mild at least and that’s almost enough… Continue reading
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For better or worse? The impact of the railways upon Berkshire, by Richard Marks
On the 30th March 1840, Reading would change forever. The Great Western Railway (GWR) had arrived. The original station opened as a temporary terminus on Brunel’s main line to Bristol followed quickly by the completion of the line throughout, a… Continue reading
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“Deference or drudgery? The census, community, and Berkshire servant life”, by Peter Jolly for Local and Community History Month
Undertaking a demographic study of Berkshire domestic service has opened my eyes to how distinctive and varied were communities within the historic county at the turn of the twentieth century. Given the impossibility of analysing all 15,000 county female servants, I… Continue reading
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Shulie, and the place of the feminist past in the feminist present, by Dr Natalie Thomlinson
‘Sex class is so deep as to be invisible.’ So begins American feminist Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 global blockbuster The Dialectic of Sex. I remember vividly the first time I read it as an undergraduate: I’d certainly encountered feminist texts before, but none… Continue reading
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