"In the twentieth century, and the heart of civilisation”: The London of the Forsytes

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2011 The Author.No abstract available

Introduction: Middlebrow London

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2011 The Author.No abstract available

Historical psychology, utopian dreams and other fool’s errands

Copyright 2008 @ the author. Originally published open access by Birmingham University. Journal now published by Edinburgh University Press.No abstract availabl

John Sommerfield and mass-observation

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below.No abstract available

'There is No Doubt that I'm Old': Everyday Narratives of Ageing

The 3-year Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP), led by a research team in the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW), and conducted as part of the New Dynamics of Ageing (NDA) programme, began on 1st May 2009 and finished at the end of August 2012. This paper briefly outlines the research and some of its findings in order to illustrate some of the advantages of its particular narrative approach to ageing and issues that concern social gerontologists among others including policymakers, stakeholders and older subjects themselves. First, it discusses the responses of members of the University of the Third Age (U3A) to reading novels with depictions of older subjects such as David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence and Jim Crace’s Arcadia. Second, it discusses responses to the Mass Observation (MO) directive of 2009, ‘Books and You’, which was commissioned by the FCMAP team and situates these responses within the wider context of replies to other MO directives on ageing. Finally, the paper concludes by discussing the changing nature of third and fourth age subjectivity and the importance of narrative understanding to the experience of ageing

The liminal persistence of interwar suburbs in the twenty-first century

Copyright 2010 @ Brunel UniversityNo abstract available