General Strike 1926

The electoral landscape of 1922 must have had a very different feel to it than previous decades; Woman’s suffrage, fear of Germany and Ireland, so many of the pre-war political landmarks had either vanished or receded into the background . This feeling of unfamiliarity was only compounded by the Representation of the Peoples Act in 1918 and the growth of trade unions. Before the war, the Trades Union Congress had three million members; by 1920 its membership had risen to six and a half million . The vote was now the right of every man from the age of 21 and every woman aged 30. This new political voice was keen to have itself heard. This paper seeks to explore why it was the Conservatives who proved the greater beneficiaries of these electoral changes enabling their domination of the politics of the 20s and 30s .

Stained Radiance (first published in 1930) was the début novel by James Leslie Mitchell (better known as Lewis Grassic Gibbon).

It charts the intertwined lives of a group of men and women struggling to live in London in the wake of the First World War and the General Strike of 1926, one of them a clear forerunner of Chris Guthrie in Gibbon’s later classic trilogy, A Scots Quair. It is remarkably in advance of the many political novels which appeared in the decade to follow, not only in its twin satires on both mainstream politics and nascent British communism, but also in its forthright exploration of the sexual politics of the period.

The text is here supported for the first time by a scholarly introduction, explanatory notes and commentary.

ISBN 9781910858226

Louis MacNeice is increasingly recognised as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, and his work has been a defining influence upon a generation of Irish poets that includes Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. "The Selected Letters" is indispensable as a resource for an understanding of the intellectual culture of the mid-twentieth century. A Classics don, poet, playwright and globetrotting BBC producer, the medley and blend of MacNeice's cultural influences seems exemplary in its modernity. He kept up a significant correspondence with E. R. Dodds, Anthony Blunt and T. S. Eliot, to name but three prominent figures of the time. During his time at the BBC MacNeice witnessed many key events, including the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of the Gold Coast from Britain in 1957, and these are recorded in two long sequences to his wife, the singer Hedli Anderson. His complex relationship to Ireland and to his Irish heritages speak resonantly to contemporary debates about Irish and Northern Irish cultural identity. Finally, the Letters will do much to broaden our understanding of a vivid and often enigmatic personality whose varied life and individual charisma have often resisted explanation.