London Clubland

This work is the first to study the gentlemen's clubs that were an important feature of the Late Victorian landscape, and the first to discover the secret history of clubmen and their world, placing them at centre stage, detailing how clubland dramatically shaped 19th and early 20th-century ideas about gender, power, class, and the city.

This work is the first to study the gentlemen's clubs that were an important feature of the Late Victorian landscape, and the first to discover the secret history of clubmen and their world, placing them at centre stage, detailing how clubland dramatically shaped 19th and early 20th-century ideas about gender, power, class, and the city.

A richly illustrated history of The Rideau Club, which was founded 150 years ago by Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir George E. Cartier. A highly accessible account of the Club's history and enduring place in the nation's capital, and the story of its evolution with vignettes of how certain members made and continue to make it a very special place.

With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating and entertaining story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London's private members' clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. In doing so he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond. This is a chronicle, as informative as it is entertaining, of the ups and downs of London clubland, and how it had an impact on parts of the world far from London. It is packed with amusing anecdotes and illustrative examples of the growth of this quirky, unique institution, which grew to spread around the world. London, though, with its four hundred clubs, was always at its heart. Thévoz reveals how everything we might have thought we knew about these clubs is wrong. They may have started out as white, male, aristocratic watering holes - but that's only part of the story. All sections of society built their own clubs and lived their lives there: highbrow and lowbrow; women and men; working-class, middle-class and upper-class; international and British. The club has been central to a distinctively British form of leisure over more than three centuries. Behind Closed Doors is a distillation of a decade of research and writing on London clubs, based on exclusive behind-the-scenes access to archives and proceedings, as well as a love of gossip and scandal.

This book analyzes the development of the Lost Generation narrative following the First World War. The author examines narratives that illustrate the fracture of upper-class identity, including well-known examples of the Lost Generation—Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Vera Brittain—as well as other less typical cases—George Mallory and JRR Tolkien—to demonstrate the effects of the First World War on British society, culture, and politics.

How Books, Reading and Subscription Libraries Defined Colonial Clubland in the British Empire argues that within an entangled web of imperial, colonial and book trade networks books, reading and subscription libraries contributed to a core and peripheral criteria of clubbability used by the "select people"—clubbable settler elite—to vet the "proper sort"—clubbable indigenous elite—as they culturally, economically and socially navigated their way towards membership in colonial clubland. As a microcosm for British-controlled areas of the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, this book assesses the history, membership, growth and collection development of three colonial subscription libraries—the Penang Library in Malaysia, the General Library of the Institute of Jamaica and the Lagos Library in Nigeria—during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work also examines the places these libraries occupied within the lives of their subscribers, and how the British Council reorganized these colonial subscription libraries to ensure their survival and the survival of colonial clubland in a post-colonial world. This book is designed to accommodate historians of Britain and its empire who are unfamiliar with library history, library historians who are unfamiliar with British history, and book historians who are unfamiliar with both topics.

The core of what we call St James's dates from the late seventeenth century, when large estates were leased by the Crown to the landed gentry after the Restoration in 1660. St James's clubs, coffee houses and institutions have been shaped by enterprise, political conflict, and Britain's emerging role as an Imperial power. This is the historic heart of London's Clubland. Over 300 years, Clubland has extended its reach to encompass Piccadilly, Mayfair, Bond Street, Covent Garden and Westminster. Ever discreet, the clubs do not draw attention to themselves, though their members are often highly influential individuals who are leaders in politics, the law, the media and much more. Palaces of Power charts the evolution of London's Clubland, St James's, exploring the social and cultural history of the city's most prestigious district, and studying the tensions between the world of privilege and an emerging public realm over the last three centuries.