About me

The discussion interests mentioned on my homepage reflect earlier themes in my work as well as current and future interests. Previous work has taken up the following concerns: the history of popular politics, popular culture, the nature and meanings of work, the history and theory of individual and collective social identities, the history and theory of the social, liberalism and the city, and the history of the state, the latter two themes in relation to governmentality. I am also interested in the theory and the writing of history, having written on the subject of history, postmodernism and the cultural turn (see my Feb., 2010 Past and Present article “What is the social in social history?”, available on this site [  Download (210.9 KiB)]). I am presently writing a book on the nature of the British state from the early nineteenth century onwards, called The Soul of Leviathan. I am also co-editing a book on the nature of material power in history, called Material Powers, published by Routledge, Spring 2010.

I was born in west London and grew up in Paddington and Notting Hill in the post-war years. This was a Catholic and Irish upbringing, my parents being immigrants from Co Mayo and Co Wexford in Ireland. The two flanking figures in Koudelka’s great picture of Ireland on the homepage are two close family relations of mine. I attended a Secondary Modern school (almost the lowest level of the class-driven state schooling then available). After school from the age of 16 I worked in a variety of jobs, more or less menial, and then attended the University of Keele in the 1960s (University motto: “Thanke God for All”). I did my graduate work at Balliol College, Oxford and then taught in London, followed by a long period at Manchester University. For those who wish to have further information see my article “More Secondary Modern Than Postmodern” [  Download (140.9 KiB)].

Photo credit: Roger Mayne, Street Cricket, Clarendon Cresent 1957

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