Brian Short

A man chases after a mysterious metal object that may not even exist — and his journey leads him on to ever-greater levels of madness, dissociation, and metaphysical conundrums.After ten years i

The Battle of the Fields tells the story of rural community and authority in Britain during the Second World War by looking at the County War Agricultural Executive Committees. From 1939 they were imb

This revealing 1997 book in the Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography series presents some of the first researches into a trove of hitherto inaccessible primary source material. A controversial component of Lloyd George's People's Budget of 1909–10 was the 'New Domesday' of landownership and land values. This rich documentation, for long locked away in the Inland Revenue's offices, became available to the public in the late 1970s. For the growing number of scholars of early twentieth century urban and rural Britain, Dr Short offers both a coherent overview and a standard source of reference to this valuable archive. Part I is concerned with the processes of assembling the material and its style of representation; Part II with suggested themes and locality studies. A final chapter places this new material in the context of discourses of state intervention in landed society prior to the Great War.

This book examines the English rural community, past and present, in its variety and dynamism. The distinguished team of contributors brings a variety of disciplinary perspectives to bear upon the central issues of movement and migration; the farm family and rural labour force; the development of contrasting rural communities; the portrayal of rural labour in both 'high' and popular culture; the changing nature of religious practice in the English countryside; the rural/urban fringe, and the spread of notions of a rural English arcadia within a predominantly urban society. Fully illustrated with accompanying maps, paintings and photographs, The English Rural Community provides an important and innovative overview of a subject where history, myth and debate are inseparably entwined. A full bibliography will assist a broad range of general readers and students of social history, historical geography and development studies approaching the subject for the first time, and the whole should