History@Kingston

While there has been tremendous interest in the life and traitorous activities of the notorious British spy Kim Philby, not many people are aware that he had a highly controversial father, St. John Philby, whose sympathies lay not with Communism but with extreme nationalism and fascism.

In 2019 a fascinating article appeared in a British journal which explored how the Third Reich’s obsession with a ‘pure’ Germanic past had led to a renewed interest in the witch hunts that took place in early modern Germany. Writing in an issue of History Today (1), historian Joel F. Harrington described how the Nazis established a secret bureau to gather evidence of...

Historians and other scholars have spent much time in recent years examining the nature of the contemporary far right, it’s roots in the past, and what possible direction it will take in the future. In a sense, there are patterns in place now that are already shaping how extreme right (ER) activists and movements are behaving and organizing, and how they see themselves and th...

Are we living in an age of anger and ill-tempered reactions? Why does everyone seem so steamed-up, aggressive or furious about certain aspects of today’s society? These are some of the intriguing questions that were once posed by Zoe Williams, writing in the UK’s daily newspaper The Guardian on 16th May, 2018, in an article which seems just as relevant today as it wa...

Work by a number of film historians in the last 20 years has thrown exciting new perspectives on the development and impact of early cinema and film-making on the cultural evolution of British society in the first quarter of the 20th century. Sarah Street, for example, in British National Cinema (1997), successfully explored the relationship between British cinema an...