This book examines the political thought expressed in the imaginative fiction of three prominent British writers and its contribution to the development of socialism, particularly through the prism of the Labour Party. It traces this influence from the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth century and concludes by considering its relevance to socialism and the Labour Party in the twenty-first century. The three writers—William Morris, Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells—first met...

Stephen Ingle is Professor at the Politics Department, University of Stirling. His main academic interests are in the relationship between politics and literature and in adversarial (two party) politics, especially in the UK.

George Orwell has had a profound influence on modern politics and culture. He is regularly invoked as an authority by journalists, commentators and politicians, and his works speak with increasing relevance to our polarised and media-saturated society.Stephen Ingle explores Orwell’s character, his life and his beliefs by guiding the reader through the main events, private and public, that shaped his life and major works. This includes his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as w...

The history of British political parties tells of change and continuity. But, how and why?This textbook continues to provide the best introduction currently available on the British political party system, explaining the history, structure, actors and policies of both the main political parties and the minor parties. Substantially revised and updated, this fourth edition contains new material on the:political party system in post-devolution Scotland and Wale...

Featuring a selection of brand new essays by a group of accomplished scholars, Arthur Koestler's Fiction and the Genre of the Novel covers all of Koestler's novels published in his lifetime, the first book to attempt this in English since Mark Levene's Arthur Koestler, published thirty-seven years ago. The team of contributors, with research backgrounds in history, political science, religious studies, law, linguistics and journalism besides literature, offers a truly mul...

An intellectual who did not like intellectuals, a socialist who did not trust the state, a writer of the left who found it easier to forgive writers of the right, a liberal who was against free markets, a Protestant who believed in religion but not in God, a fierce opponent of nationalism who defined Englishness for a generation. Aside from being one of the greatest political essayists in the English language and author of two of the most famous books in twentieth century literature, Georg...

From a leading British historian, the story of how fear of war shaped modern EnglandBy the end of World War I, Britain had become a laboratory for modernity. Intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and artists?among them Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells?sought a vision for a rapidly changing world. Coloring their innovative ideas and concepts, from eugenics to Freud?s unconscious, was a creeping fear that the West was staring down the end of civilizat...

The present-day Republic of Ireland was created by a revolutionary elite which developed between 1858 and 1914. Here, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, Professor Tom Garvin, considers the social origins of the revolutionary politicians who became the rulers of Ireland after the 1916 Rising and examines their political preconceptions, ideologies and prejudices. In many cases they were not only influenced by old agrarian grievances and memories of the Great Irish Famine, but also, an...

From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. In Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow, David Goodway seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition. This book succeeds as simultaneously a cultural history of left-libertarian thought in Britain and a demonstration of the applicability of that history to current politics. Goodway argues that a rec...

Author Christopher Hollis knew George Orwell personally during his schooldays at Eton, afterwards in Burma, and at the end of his life. His study of Orwell’s books is therefore illuminated by some anecdotes of reminiscence. However, it is important to note that this book is primarily a study rather than a biography. Hollis examines Orwell’s books in order and traces through them the development of this unmatched literary giant’s thought process.From the experiences described in

“Hitchens presents a George Orwell fit for the twenty-first century.”—The Boston GlobeIn this widely acclaimed biographical essay, the masterful polemicist Christopher Hitchens assesses the life, the achievements, and the myth of the great political writer and participant George Orwell. True to his contrarian style, Hitchens is both admiring and aggressive, sympathetic yet critical, taking true measure of his subject as hero and problem. Answering both the...

Professor John Carey shows how early twentieth-century intellectuals imagined the 'masses' as semi-human swarms, drugged by popular newspapers and cinema, and ripe for extermination. Exposing the revulsion from common humanity in George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, W. B. Yeats and other canonized writers, he relates this to the cult of the Nietzschean Superman, which found its ultimate exponent in Hitler.Carey'...