From William Morris to Sergeant Pepper: Studies in the Radical Domestic - Softcover

CUL

paper 0-930664-20-5 A dense but delicate study of modern British writers and artists of change within their conservative but empathetic culture. Stansky (History/Stanford; On or About December 1910, 1996, etc.) has culled scores of his essays and reviews to assemble this book. A leading American scholar of modern British history, he is intrigued by revolutionary writers, artists, and politicos who are tolerated, even grudgingly admired, by a society otherwise glacially slow to evolve. Unlike most academic historians, Stansky confesses to being ``particularly fascinated by my subjects' younger days, when their personality was being fashioned.'' The young British aristocrats who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War are thus of special interest to him, and he respects the more personal approach in Martin Gilbert's massive study of Winston Churchill. Apart from George Orwell and William Morris, the latter of whom he treats as a major force in art, politics, and literature, Stansky concentrates on the writers of the Bloomsbury Group, creative people who are accepted as domestic yet suspected as radicals. Politically, the chapters are balanced between leftists like W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender and right-wingers such as Evelyn Waugh, Oswald Mosley, and Unity Mitford. One chapter examines the democratic kingdom's essential community of inside outsidersBritish Jews. Only in the last chapter does Stansky take up the Fab Four, citing critics comparing them to Chopin, and placing ``Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'' in a long British tradition of anti-traditional work. He notes that Ringo Starr, ``the most popular and least intellectual of the Beatles,'' wears the sergeants stripes. Although he passes over ``loony'' things in Monty Python, its nice to know that academe has at least recognized the Beatles. A caffeinated but civilized survey that should be just the cup of tea for the serious academic Anglophile. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.