Cosmo Gordon Lang

The period 1928-1942 saw some of the greatest political and social upheavals in modern British history. Lang, as Archbishop of Canterbury, led the Church of England through this tumultuous period and was a pivotal influence in political and religious decision-making. In this book, Robert Beaken provides a new perspective on Lang, including his considerable relationship with the royal family. Beaken also shows how Lang proved to be a sensitive leader during wartime, opposing any demonisation of the enemy and showing compassion to conscientious objectors. Despite his central role at a time of flux, there has been little written on Lang since the original biography published in 1949, and history has not been kind to this intellectually gifted but emotionally complex man. Although Lang has often been seen as a fairly unsuccessful archbishop who was resistant to change, Beaken shows that he was, in fact, an effective leader of the Anglican community at a time when the Church of England was internally divided over issues surrounding the Revised Prayer Book and its position in an ever-changing world. Lang's reputation is therefore ripe for reassessment. Drawing on previously unseen material and first-hand interviews, Beaken tells the story of a fascinating and complex man, who was, he argues, Britain's first 'modern' Archbishop of Canterbury.

Publisher's description: For nearly forty years Archbishop Lang was closely concerned in the affairs of church and state. Many of the most influential people in the country respected and leaned upon his judgment. He knew nearly all the people who mattered most in the nation's affairs and knew some of them very well. Contemporaries who watched him at work have declared him with emphasis a great archbishop. The claim is easier to assert than justify, for it hangs not upon any single quality or achievement but on a multiplicity of gift and merit, and of duties faithfully and often brilliantly performed. It is the greatness of the forest rather than any particular tree in it. The man remains, that complicated, introspective, emotional person who has been allowed, so far as has been possible in these pages, to speak for himself.

The topic of population is treated only lightly in the major modern biographies of John Maynard Keynes, yet Keynes himself had strong - if varying - views on the subject. For many years he maintained a neo-Malthusian view of population, based on a postulated link between population growth and deteriorating terms of trade. This led him to take up a militant stance towards 'overpopulated' countries, notably India, China, and Egypt. Keynes on Population publishes two of John Maynard Keynes's manuscripts not published in the Collected Writings: his Cambridge lectures on population and 1914 Oxford lecture on 'Population'. It provides a detailed commentary on the text of 'Population' and discusses the extent of Keynes's engagement with the Social Darwinist doctrine of the 'rapid multiplication of the unfit' and with eugenics. It then traces the subsequent vicissitudes of his views on population and his interventions in the contemporary politics of population. These include his part in the 1920s campaign for birth control, the reversal of his neo-Malthusianism, and his eventual support for family allowances.

During the reign of Queen Victoria, herself an ardent theatregoer as well as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a remarkable rapprochement was effected between the Church and the stage. This 1997 book explores the implications for the theatre of the great religious movements of the period: Tractarianism, Christian Socialism and Latitudinarianism. This central relationship is seen in the context of other important themes in Victorian cultural history such as censorship, urbanization, transport, leisure, self-improvement and women's emancipation. The volume contains portraits of significant churchmen, dramatists, actors and actresses, including Newman and Keble, Bulwer Lytton and Shaw, Irving, Fanny Kemble and Ellen Terry. They were amongst the influential figures who participated in the search for a common culture which preoccupied the nineteenth century. To the Victorians the Church and the theatre were important parts of everyday life; in this study the two institutions are explored in relation not only to each other but also to the social, economic and intellectual movements of the period.

The private diary of James G. McDonald (1886–1964) offers a unique and hitherto unknown source on the early history of the Nazi regime and the Roosevelt administration's reactions to Nazi persecution of German Jews. Considered for the post of U.S. ambassador to Germany at the start of FDR's presidency, McDonald traveled to Germany in 1932 and met with Hitler soon after the Nazis came to power. Fearing Nazi intentions to remove or destroy Jews in Germany, in 1933 he became League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and sought aid from the international community to resettle outside the Reich Jews and others persecuted there. In late 1935 he resigned in protest at the lack of support for his work. This is the eagerly awaited first of a projected three-volume work that will significantly revise the ways that scholars and the world view the antecedents of the Holocaust, the Shoah itself, and its aftermath.