Bøker av Raphael Samuel

This work takes issue with heritage baiters, and argues that we live in an expanding historical culture, one which is newly alert to the evidence of the visual, more democratic than earlier versions of the national past, and much more hospitable to hitherto stigmatized minorities.

A fascinating account of life as a member of the Communist Party of Great BritainThe Lost World of British Communism is a vivid account of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Raphael Samuel, one of post-war Britain's most notable historians, draws on novels of the period and childhood recollections of London's East End, as well as memoirs and Party archives, to evoke the world of British Communism in the 1940s. Samuel conjures up the era when the movement was at the height of its political and theoretical power, brilliantly bringing to life an age in which the Communist Party enjoyed huge prestige as a bulwark for the struggles against fascism and colonialism.

When Theatres of Memory was first published in 1994, it transformed the debate about what is to be considered history and questioned the role of ';heritage' that lies at the heart of every Western nation's obsession with the past. Today, in the age of Downton Abbey and Mad Men, we are once again conjuring historical fictions to make sense of our everyday lives.In this remarkable book, Samuel looks at the many different ways we use the ';unofficial knowledge' of the past. Considering such varied areas as the fashion for ';retrofitting,' the rise of family history, the joys of collecting old photographs, the allure of reenactment societies and televised adaptations of Dickens, Samuel transforms our understanding of the uses of history. He shows us that history is a living practice, something constantly being reassessed in the world around us.

A collection of essays which offer a testimony of the dialogue between the present and the past.