of a social historian
I was born at the height of the Miners' Strike in the summer of 1984. I've often wondered what my parents were thinking of - bringing a child into a world at a time of such strife and division, with the fear of nuclear apocalypse looming so large. As I slowly realised the pictures on …
Two big jobs have dominated the first months of 2016 for me. One was putting the finishing touches to and sending off to the publishers the manuscript for my first sole-authored book, Payment and Philanthropy in British Healthcare, 1918-48. The other was being part of a team at Warwick University setting up and launching the new …
"What is money? Put simply," reasoned Diane Morgan's comic creation, Philomena Cunk, "money is the best way we have of telling how much money you've got". This works as comedy because it sounds absurd, and it is. But it's also more-or-less the premise on which much Western thinking about money and its social function has been based for …
Musings 