Special Relationships: People and Places by Asa Briggs

Special Relationships: People and Places by Asa Briggs

In this highly readable but completely unconventional book Asa Briggs, writer, lecturer and professor, wellknown on both sides of the Atlantic, goes back in time to his own hometown, Keighley in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, now incorporated in Bradford. He describes how he got his unusual name, a question often put to him, and considers whether having been born in an industrial town surrounded by moors has shaped his writing and his ideas of history.He has been a pioneer in many fields of history, particularly the history of the Victorians and the history of broadcasting, and in this book he traces what he calls special relationships which have inspired his writing in those and other fields, including the history of wine and of sport. A great traveller with a strong sense of the visual, he lists Leeds, Birmingham, Chicago and Melbourne among places that figure in his own map of learning, a term that he was the first to use. He also speculates on time travel.His career has been as unconventional as this book. While working in universities at home and abroad from 1945 to 1994, he has had an exceptionally wide range of friends, including many outside academic life, and he focusses on them rather than himself, although the book has an important autobiographical dimension. They include John Reith, Dennis Foreman, Harold Macmillan,Jim Callaghan, Denis and Edna Healey, Richard Crossman, John Fulton, Jennie Lee, Denys Lasdun, Penelope Lively, P. D. James, Geoffrey Heyworth, John Sainsbury and his neighbour in Scotland who, alas, died young, Alistair Grant.The last chapter deals in detail with his birthday year and with the 50th anniversary of the University of Sussex and the 40th anniversary of the enrolment of the first students in the Open University, but the book as a whole offers a portrait of an age.The tree on the front of this dust jacket is more than symbolic. This book ends not with people or with places but with trees.

Professor Lord Asa Briggs is one of the most important historians of Britain. He is world-renowned for his work in social history, culture, and communications. He has also been a national and international leader in education, and in life-long learning. Now in his nineties, he has been writing poetry since he was 13. But this is the first publication of this body of his literary work. The book is an important cultural event. It will take its place amongst Lord Briggs' other classic works, his five-volume history of the BBC, his trail-blazing The Age of Improvement 1783-1867, and his famous historical trilogy Victorian People, Victorian Cities, and Victorian Things. The author, a vivid writer, also provides a strictly necessary Introduction in which he discusses his ideas about poetry and how and why he has written poetry over the years. Asa Briggs has a very strong visual sense and an intuitive sense of place. In his work, too, he has always related literature to history. He is widely known as an effective and entertaining serious broadcaster, and his feeling for language is special. The volume demonstrates Asa Briggs' taste, intellectual discipline, technique and literary responses to the events and people he has known during his long life, and the challenges in his life. His style is his own, although he acknowledges his interest in the works of other poets including Matthew Arnold, John Betjeman, Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Dylan Thomas. He grew up, in a working-class family, in the West Riding town of Keighley, and at age 16 he won a scholarship to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. In his long career the author was a major influence on the development of new universities in Britain, and of education abroad too. He has been Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex, Master of Worcester College Oxford, and Chancellor of The Open University, of which he was one of the originators. He served as an intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War Two. The poems particularly illustrate the significance of locality, of boundaries, of oral history, of the world of labour, and of the importance of language and of class. They also contemplate the particular in terms of the general. And the relationships between public and private events. All of these elements have been an important focus for Asa Briggs and for his democratic approaches. His works, indeed, have implied the case for optimism in social progress. His life and works have greatly delineated and enriched democratic culture, together with his studies of the dynamics of economic and social change.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781848326675
ISBN 10	184832667X
Title	Special Relationships: People and Places
Author	Asa Briggs
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Year published	2012-12-01
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable