The Yorkshire novelist Storm Jameson wrote that her work tended to ‘sag beneath my great ideas’, as she fought to reconcile her own frustrations with a world of isms and inconsistencies. This chapter explores In the Second Year (1936) Storm Jameson’s dystopian vision of fascist Britain and what this might look like. Like many of her other novels is waterlogged with dialogues and monologues which seek to unpack and explore the great ideas of the age - modernity; capitalism; materialism; individualism - and the ways in which they inform and underpin the attractions of a particularly British fascism, one fashioned in a crucible of class prejudices, the public school system and growing inequality.

This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

This essay examines W.G. Sebald’s relationship to the region of his birth, the Allgäu and explores its significance for his literary work. In his stories, he refers several times to his region of origin, to places and memories there, making his Allgäu past on the one hand a point of repulsion and on the other a reservoir of themes and images from which he draws for his prose. In this way, his “Heimat” (homeland) becomes literarily charged in a way that makes Sebald’s literary writings both fascinating and revelatory in terms of their poetics.

With the Royal Commission now behind them and the Depression receding, Vickers-Armstrongs was once again able to fully focus on business and the needs of their customers. They began to rebuild their exports, but then the international market was reluctantly put aside for British rearmament in anticipation of renewed conflict. Vickers-Armstrongs faced a tsunami of orders across all areas of their business and initially struggled to meet British war needs but ultimately rose to the occasion. Vickers-Armstrongs employees served in government and the firm also oversaw shadow factories in addition to significantly expanding its own production. Their interwar investments in tanks and aircraft were vital to the British war effort, and the Supermarine Spitfire became iconic. In the aftermath of the war a familiar threat to the future of the firm reemerged: nationalization. Vickers-Armstrongs were unable to prevent it and the English Steel Corporation was nationalized by the Labour Government, complicating Vickers-Armstrongs operations. However, when the government fell, the incoming Conservative Government enabled denationalization of English Steel, returning it to the Vickers-Armstrongs fold. The era closes with rearmament for the Korean War.

This chapter explores divorce law reform in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland government liaised with Westminster regarding the removal of divorce from parliament’s jurisdiction from 1931; however, Westminster’s passage of Herbert’s bill along with the reform which in 1937 added desertion of three years’ duration; presumption of a spouse’s death; cruelty, although still legislatively undefined; and incurable insanity as sole grounds for divorce revived the debate in regard to equity of divorce provison throughout the UK. Debates concerning the Matrimonial Causes Act (NI) of 1939 are explored alongside the impact of the reform which transferred divorce jurisdiction to the Northern Ireland High Court, reformed the grounds for divorce along English lines and ended the faltering criminal conversation action, replacing it with a statutory action for damages. The subsequent rise in divorce rates in Northern Ireland and later divore law reforms are explored as well as the continuing moral conservatism bolstering cross-party oppoition to ‘easy’ divorce.