Constructions of Progressive Learning tells the story of the institution through its architecture – a perspective largely overlooked in histories of progressive education. The book demonstrates how Dartington’s learning environments both shaped and reflected changing ideas about the body, gender, democracy, pedagogy and class. It argues that the architecture of progressive education was not fixed, but evolved in response to shifts in leadership, policy and educational philosophy. Drawing on Dartington’s innovations in performance writing, the book weaves archival research, oral history and site writing practices into a richly layered narrative. The method brings marginalised voices of forgotten staff and students into dialogue with more dominant accounts of headmasters and architects. In doing so, the book offers a timely reflection on how educational environments might centre wellbeing, relationships and lived experience, rather than performance metrics alone.

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This is the first major study of Irish marble. It uncovers the largely unheard-of marble industry by tracing stone from quarry source to marble works to building. The book’s interdisciplinary approach identifies key marble deposits and their distinctive characteristics, outlines workshop and quarry practices, reconstructs trade paths and reveals connections between communities. It enables a holistic and contextual attribution of architectural marble and broadens the understanding of nineteenth-century Irish Gothic Revival architecture. Moreover, this research repositions Irish marble within an international framework, highlighting its contribution to transnational material culture and geological heritage.

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The book presents a diverse range of critical approaches to the archive on local, global, communal and activist-artistic fronts, and is informed by archival methods that emerge from workshops, translation practice, medieval-modern poetic practice, creative writing, publishing history, as well as those of the exhibition and the installation. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book rethinks the boundaries of the medieval archive (both temporal and institutional) and argues for an expanded understanding of new scholarship with creative practice at its core.

Collected in this volume are essays by world-leading scholars, prize-winning poets and writers, as well as previously unpublished work by artists, which all examine archives as caches of knowledge. There are collaborative dialogues that approach bodies, bones and landscapes as domains that form new archives over time. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past – whether from the perspective of class, Queer Studies or Indigenous history – and challenge the ongoing and urgent issue of archival access.

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The Known Soldier brings this remarkable endeavour to life through interviews with relatives of soldiers who died at Fromelles and undertakes a critical assessment of how genetic testing intersects with memory and mourning. Relatives reflect on the temporal, affective, political and ethical dimensions of DNA-testing war dead, as scientific advances allow these investigations to reach further back in time. This book examines the state’s use of scientific methods in its official commemoration of war, and considers how relatives navigate, and sometimes resist, scientific methods and official narratives. The stories of individual soldiers that emerge shape the historical and political representation of the battle at key moments such as its centenary.

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Critical Thinking for the Arts and Humanities avoids promoting a view of critical thinking as a set of generic skills that apply across academia. Instead, it encourages students to understand the skills they will be expected to demonstrate in their own study of the arts and humanities. Approaches to knowledge vary across academic disciplines – and this book equips students with the ability to think critically in their own work.

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Please Sir! featured the lives of young working-class people in a distinctive manner that blended realism and romanticism. In an engaging narrative, Gillian Mitchell explores the programme’s background, its comedic style, cast of characters and depictions of contemporary issues, from educational matters to questions of gender, generation, race and ethnicity. She explores the positive contribution of LWT’s early ambitions to the success of Please Sir!, then turns to the impact on the programme’s immediate and long-term reputation of crises that afflicted LWT as it failed in its audacious bid to alter the ‘popular’ image of ITV with its highbrow programming. Ultimately, the book argues that Please Sir! reveals much about the social, cultural and televisual era in which it was produced.

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Starting at George III’s Kew Palace and the Prince Regent’s Carlton House, then moving in ever wider circles, the book considers the significance of food for understanding the royal family, the wider British population, their European neighbours, and the British and colonised people in the Atlantic world and the Indian subcontinent. With a growing overseas empire, Britain was an increasingly powerful nation, and the ability to choose was one of the ways this power was exercised. The cuisine that emerged was complex, with wealthy Britons adopting, adapting, or rejecting the foods of European enemies and allies or colonised peoples and places. ‘Britishness’ was an ever-shifting balance of European multiculturalism, imperial ambition, tradition and experimentation, a messy mix that reveals the entanglement of cultures and cuisines, continually changed by the people who cook and eat the food.

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It discusses how organic advocates on both sides of the Atlantic deployed the Hunzas, a community in British India (later Pakistan), as an example of a ‘tribe’ whose vigour could be ascribed to their farming techniques and diets. The narrative concludes by demonstrating how US travel writers in the 1950s and 1960s represented Hunza as a Shangri-La – a paradise whose inhabitants lived prolonged lives in blissful contentment.

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