Angus Calder is an academic writer, historian, and literary editor with a background in English literature, politics and cultural studies. In 1967 he won the Eric Gregory Award for his poetry. The term English literature refers to literature written in the English language, or literature composed in English by writers who are not necessarily from England. ... Politics is the process and method of making decisions for groups. ... Cultural studies combines sociology, literary theory, film/video studies, and cultural anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial societies. ... 1967 was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Gregory Award can be: The Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, awarded to British poets under the age of 30 on the basis of a submitted collection of literary works The Bernard V. Gregory Award for Cultural Diversity, given by the American Lung Association The Graham Gregory Award...
Revolutionary Empire (1981) studied three centuries of imperial development by English speakers, to the end of the eighteenth century. The Myth of the Blitz (1991) argued that received ideas of the civilian population's reaction to the bombing of London (1940/1, at its most intense) still reflected wartime propaganda. 1981 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... (17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ... North Korean propaganda showing a soldier destroying the United States Capitol building. ...
These are not, as some might suspect, questions I picked up at a recondite trivia night, though AngusCalder's marvellous and marvellously eccentric anthology could well provide a rich source of questions to stump even the brainiest devotees of out-of-the-way facts and information.
Calder, the author of the highly influential The People's War, beside other works of social history, literary criticism and volumes of verse, has given new life to an ancient literary form that goes back at least as far as Plutarch's Lives from the early part of the second century.
Calder's sketch of Billie Holiday (1915-59) is a model of grace and compassion.
Born to Scottish parents in England, these days Calder is a fixture on the Edinburgh scene, a nationalist and socialist of distinctive stamp (he slipped from the SNP into the ranks of the SSP about a year ago).
In between, the essays are iconoclastic only as far as Calder is aware of the commonplace misunderstandings of history, such as the widely held notion that Culloden was an "English victory" rather than the defeat in Scotland of an insurgent minority.
Calder is an unaffected writer whose words on the page sound just as he speaks, mixing classical allusion with slang, sentimentality with name-calling, always challenging the reader to follow the logic of his conversation.
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