La Francia sotto le bombe degli Alleati 1940-1945

This book chapter outlines the scope and strategies of Allied bombing raids on France between 1940 and 1945, as well as the reactions of the Vichy state, the French people, and the Resistance.

Young people’s caring relations and transitions within families affected by HIV

This chapter provides insight into young people’s caring relations and transitions within what is often considered a particularly ‘troubling’ familial context in both the global North and South: living with HIV. I analyse the findings from two qualitative studies of young people’s caring roles in families affected by HIV in the UK, Tanzania and Uganda from the perspective of a feminist ethics of care, emotion work and life course transitions.

Securing Peace in Europe, 1945-62: Thoughts for the Post-Cold War Era

Articles include: Beatrice Heuser: ‘Stalin as Hitler's Successor: Western Interpretations of the Soviet threat', pp. 17-40

‘Historical ‘lessons’ and discourse on defence in France, Germany, 1945-1990’,

This article demonstrates how experiences of the same historical events (especially wars), but experienced from different angles, have led France and Germany to draw diametrically opposed lessons from them, which play key roles in the articulation of their defence postures and strategies.

The emergence of Agribusiness in Europe and the development of the Western European broiler chicken industry, 1945-73

This article presents new data on the emergence and growth of the leading Western European poultry industries after 1945. It shows that those countries where poultry output grew most quickly – especially the UK, Italy and Spain – were also the countries where the agricultural sectors adopted US technologies and US agribusiness organizational structures most vigorously. Elsewhere in Western Europe, poultry output grew much less quickly and the adoption of agribusiness structures lagged behind. By contrast, the poultry sector in the USSR was based on the Soviet collectivist system. This was the largest poultry sector in Europe, but also much less efficient. The article suggests therefore that the diffusion of agribusiness and the increase in poultry output were deeply entwined across Europe, with potentially important consequences for the different roles and impacts of agribusiness in Europe.

Les Français sous les bombes alliées, 1940-1945

Plus de 517 000 tonnes de bombes sont déversées sur l’Hexagone par les alliés entre 1940 et 1945, soit près de sept fois plus que le total largué sur le Royaume-Uni par la Luftwaffe. Plus de 57 000 Français en sont morts, dont plus de 38 000 au cours de la seule année 1944. Cet aspect fondamental de l’histoire des années noires, que les survivants et les familles des victimes ne connaissent que trop bien, et qui a fait l’objet de nombreuses études locales, est encore relativement marginalisé de la « grande histoire » de l’Occupation et de la Libération. Pourquoi et comment les armées aériennes alliées ont-ils attaqué la France ? Quelles mesures ont été prises par le gouvernement de Vichy pour protéger les populations ? Comment les Alliés ont-ils justifié les attaques auprès des Français, et comment la propagande vichyssoise a-t-elle essayé de les mettre à profit ? Comment les populations civiles ont-ils vécu les bombardements, et comment se sont-elles mobilisées pour se défendre ? Comment la Résistance a-t-elle réagi à des attaques qui ne pouvaient que nuire à son audience au sein des Français, ainsi qu’à celle des « Anglo-saxons » ? Autant de questions auxquelles l’ouvrage comme le documentaire répondent, avec l’appui de documents d’archives britanniques et françaises, mais aussi de témoignages nombreux et émouvants.

Poetry of social conscience, poetry of transition: Ann Hawkshaw's 'Introductory Stanzas' and 'The Mother to her Starving Child'

Through close readings of Ann Hawkshaw's poetry in the context of industrial Manchester in the 1840s, this article highlights the interaction of form and content in poetry that makes use of the idea of the past to question or complicate the politics of the present.

Ionospheric measurements of relative coronal brightness during the total solar eclipses of 11 August, 1999 and 9 July, 1945

Swept-frequency (1-10 MHz) ionosonde measurements were made at Helston, Cornwall (50 degrees 06'N, 5 degrees 18'W) during the total solar eclipse on August 11, 1999. Soundings were made every three minutes. We present a method for estimating the percentage of the ionising solar radiation which remains unobscured at any time during the eclipse by comparing the variation of the ionospheric E-layer with the behaviour of the layer during a control day. Application to the ionosonde date for II August, 1999, shows that the flux of solar ionising radiation fell to a minimum of 25 +/- 2% of the value before and after the eclipse. For comparison, the same technique was also applied to measurements made during the total solar eclipse of 9 July, 1945, at Sormjole (63 degrees 68'N, 20 degrees 20'E) and yielded a corresponding minimum of 16 +/- 2%. Therefore the method can detect variations in the fraction of solar emissions that originate from the unobscured corona and chromosphere. We discuss the differences between these two eclipses in terms of the nature of the eclipse, short-term fluctuations, the sunspot cycle and the recently-discovered long-term change in the coronal magnetic field.

The Rilke of Ruth Speirs: new poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus & others

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is universally recognized as among the most important twentieth-century German-language poets. Here, for the first time, are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs (1916-2000), a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during World War Two, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Though described as ‘excellent’ and ‘the best’ by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exception of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered between covers and in print. This volume, edited by John Pilling and Peter Robinson, brings Speirs’ translations the belated recognition they deserve. Her much-revised and considered versions are a key document in the history of Rilke’s Anglophone dissemination. Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet’s extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice.

Voices of Occupiers/Liberators: The BBC's Radio Propaganda in Italy between 1942 and 1945

The ambiguity of the role played by British propaganda in Italy during the Second World War is clearly reflected in the phenomenon of Radio London. While Radio London raised the morale of the Italian civilians living under the Fascist regime and provided them with alternative information on the conflict, the microphones of the BBC were also used by the British government to address a country they were planning to occupy. In this article, I will analyse the occupation/liberation operations that were run at the BBC Italian Service from two separate angles. On the one hand, the analysis of the programmes broadcast between the months preceding the Allies’ landing in Sicily and the actual occupation shows how the Allies built their image as liberators and guarantors of better living conditions. On the other, the analysis of the relationships between the Foreign Office and the anti-Fascist exiles reveals that the Italian BBC broadcasters were not always allowed to freely express their political opinion or to dispose of their own lives.