What are you reading? – 1 March 2021

John Anchor, professor of international strategy at the University of Huddersfield, is reading Madeleine Albright’s Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 (Harper Collins, 2012). “Albright was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. Her father was a diplomat in pre-war Czechoslovakia, who fled the country after the Nazi invasion. He played an important role in the government-in-exile in London during the Second World War and then in Czechoslovakia’s democratic interlude between 1945 and 1948. Albright’s parents emigrated to the United States after the Communist takeover in 1948 and she was raised as a Roman Catholic. However, during her vetting for the position of secretary of state, she discovered that she was in fact of Jewish origin and that her grandparents had perished in the Holocaust. This fascinating and erudite book is the history of her family and Czechoslovakia between 1937, the year of her birth, and 1948 – and of how the Nazis, Great Britain, the Holocaust and the Cold War affected them both.”

Kalwant Bhopal, professor of education and social justice at the University of Birmingham, is reading Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (Penguin, 2016). “This book is about friendship and family, the choices that we make and those which are made for us (often on the basis of race, gender and class) and which dictate our lives. Swing Time tells the story of two girls growing up in Willesden in north London – both brown-skinned – who dream of being dancers and how their lives take divergent paths. Smith takes you on a journey from London to New York, West Africa and back again. Her powerful, beautiful writing is mesmerising. Definitely a page-turner, and one you won’t want to put down until you reach the end. A must-read for anyone interested in the complexities of being true to yourself while being proud of your heritage.”

R. C. Richardson, emeritus professor of history at the University of Winchester, is reading Rory Muir’s Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made their Way in Jane Austen’s England (Yale University Press, 2019). “This well-written overview explores the career options available to younger sons (the ‘victims’ of the primogeniture system) in this period. The advantages and disadvantages offered by openings in the church and other professions, in banking, commerce, the civil service, the army and navy, and in India are all rehearsed. There is a heavy reliance on individual case histories and, as the book’s subtitle makes clear, the author frequently moves in and out of both Jane Austen’s novels and her own immediate and extended family. Indeed, the conclusion is chiefly animated by his lively conjectures about the future of a Bennett family in Pride and Prejudice consisting entirely of sons and not daughters.”