Content area
Full Text
RR 2011/195 The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture Edited by Michael Higgins, Clarissa Smith and John Storey Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2010 xvi + 323 pp. ISBN 978 0 521 86497 8 (hbck); ISBN 978 0 521 68346 3 (pbck) £55; $90 (hbck); £18.99; $29.99 (pbck)
Cambridge Companions to Culture
Keywords Culture, United Kingdom
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121111134250
Without wishing to sound flippant, the Nazi regime has a lot to answer for insofar as the word "Culture" is construed. Leaving aside the devastation Hitler's Germany perpetrated on the peoples and cultures of those countries it overran, the celebrated misquotation "When I hear the word Culture I reach for my gun", attributed incorrectly to Hermann Göring, originated during the Third Reich (the source was probably Hanns Johst, a German playwright active then, and the quote probably ended with the word Browning - indeed a gun but possibly a reference to the doyens of nineteenth century English literature Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert). Which has perhaps helped make the term "culture" dubious if not verging on the risible, witness the Barry Humphries creation Sir Les Patterson, Australian cultural attaché, and the numbers of politically incorrect jokes produced by an internet search ("Is the expression Australian Culture a contradiction in terms?").
The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture as described in the introductory chapter by the editors Michael Higgins, Clarissa Smith and John Storey "brings together seventeen critical and insightful essays by some of the leading academics...