Conflict over Convoys: Anglo-American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War.

1997 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 403
Author(s):  
Keith W. Bird ◽  
Kevin Smith
2020 ◽  
pp. 69-102
Author(s):  
Steven Fielding ◽  
Bill Schwarz ◽  
Richard Toye

This chapter focuses on the way in which political actors of different stripes have used the idea of Churchill as a means of self-validation. It explores how, in the decades after his death, Churchill became a key point of reference in Anglo-American relations, a theme which intensified after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The chapter also examines how Churchill has been used by those on both sides of the long-running debate about British membership of the European Union. Although Remainers invoked the memory of the 1946 ‘United States of Europe’ speech, they struggled to sell Churchill as a complex figure who was prepared to make concessions on British sovereignty in the interests of future peace. The ingrained, bulldog image remained hegemonic—even though Churchill’s popular reputation had shifted in subtle but significant ways since the end of the Second World War.


Author(s):  
Peter Kirkpatrick

When situating 20th-century Australian poetry within world literary space, critical histories often map it against the Anglo-American tradition and find it wanting. In particular, and despite the strong reputations that poets such as Judith Wright and A. D. Hope continue to enjoy, there is a tendency to regard Australian poetry from the Second World War until the mid-1960s as variously complacent, insular, or retrograde: representative of what John Tranter in his introduction to The New Australian Poetry in 1979 called “a moribund poetic culture.” Certainly, there was a turning away from avant-garde experimentalism in the immediate postwar period (as there was in Britain and the United States), but in Australia, this has been linked to a discrediting of modernism as a result of the Ern Malley hoax. In the Malley “affair,” as Michael Heyward dubbed it, two conservative poets hoodwinked the editor of the avant-garde journal Angry Penguins with a suite of poems written by a wholly invented working-class surrealist. As a result, according to Wright (among others), Australian poets became less adventurous in favor of more traditional forms. On top of this, recent revisionist accounts of the hoax have virtually canonized “Malley” himself as a bona fide modernist and so exacerbated a sense of lost opportunity after the mid-1940s. Yet modernizing impulses may take many forms, and it is an overstatement to suggest that innovation had ceased, or that the poetry of this period was somehow disengaged from the rest of the world or from international literary-political debates. A reassessment shows that Australian poets were keenly engaged with the questions of their time but also dealt with the persistent, unresolved problem of how to become “unprovincial,” overcoming a cultural cringe that now gravitated away from Britain and toward America. In fact, for Australian literature prior to the emergence of Patrick White, poetry, rather than beating a retreat, actually led the way forward. It is time, then, to reconsider the poetry of the postwar era within its own cultural ecologies, acknowledging that Australian poetic modernism, while it remains contested, may also be distinctive.


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