Diane Purkiss is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford and fellow of Keble College. She is the author of the much-admired The Witch in History, Troublesome Things, and the acclaimed history, The English Civil War. EU is extremely popular with Polish people – at least according to every single poll. PiS has made it very clear that is fully committed to EU membership. The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will.

Roundabouts and Roundheads | Books | The Guardian

If you wanted to ever have fruit, you had to be acting to preserve every tiny scrap of it. They’re preserving not only peak, ripe, glossy apples, but gathering up what they call the greenings, the windfalls that dropped before they were ripe. There are dozens of uses for those—you can make them into a kind of vinegar for salad dressing, or into a relish, or into a sugar paste as a dessert. All this thinking and planning and oversight is hugely interesting. It wasn’t like the weirdness of being a housewife in the 1950s, where inessentially you were confined to a tiny, not very interactive, space. It was more like running an enterprise of reasonable size. Yes, actually too much fun, which is one reason why it took me ages. It’s also an inexhaustibly large topic, even confined just to England. My first draft was twice the length of the book actually published. And even so, the book is long, isn’t it? Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. Weirdly, a lot of food history ignores food preparation, and particularly the material needs of food preparation. There are only a small number of books that focus on the kitchen and utensils, but they’re very important in terms of what you can and can’t cook. The main reason people choose the foods they do is material. So: Do you own a cake tin? Do you have enough resources to get an oven hot enough to bake a cake? Have you heard of cake? I chose this book because it’s one of the best accounts of the way we eat and how that is shaped by what we have and what we inherit in the way of equipment and expectations.I loved the whole atmosphere of the Oxford Literary Festival. From breakfast, alongside some of the attendees, who were talking books with each other a mile a minute, to the public event at The Sheldonian where everyone was lively and engaged – I felt I had arrived in a kind of literary heaven. Clip of Marguerite Patten inducing a show from the 1950s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgG9oMq4l2U

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But it gets worse. Buried in the fine print, unnoticed by many, is the fact we remain hooked into the EU’s loan book.” For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

How to make a steamed sponge pudding: https://britishfoodhistory.com/2023/01/13/how-to-make-a-steamed-sponge-pudding-a-step-by-step-guide/ A rich and indulgent history, English Food will change the way you view your food and understand your past. I mean, it’s a horrible illness. Not only is it physically incredibly painful, and unbelievably exhausting—like a dreadfully bad Covid—but the worst thing about it is that healed wounds open up again. So it has this spectral quality in a military outfit. The leg that got shot suddenly reopens and starts bleeding again. Things like that. To return to idea of ”restorative nostalgia” with regard to Poland’s past, for example: I mean, crikey. Unless we are talking about a wish to return to the golden days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, surely Poland’s history has been an endless story of oppression by its more powerful neighbours (since the 18th century at least). Apart from periods of independence between 1919 and 1939, and the post-communist era since 1989, I’m not sure where this nostalgia would come from; unless it is nostalgia for a Parisian garret in the 19th century in which one can plot a romantic uprising against the Russians/Prussians or Austrians. Yes agreed. Sadly Johnson has massively let us down and the Tories would be toast if only there was a less worse option.

Professor Diane Purkiss | Faculty of English

Sorry Paul, Poland played the game of Great Powers and it lost. If you ignore the days of Polish expansion toward Eastern Orthodox territories you are right.Sadly thanks to an astonishingly selfish aristocracy and an utterly absurd governmental system things then went rapidly downhill, resulting in the first partition in 1772, the second in 1793 and final extinction in 1795 We tend to assume, historically, that people’s standard of living and life expectancy just goes on improving on a steady upward trajectory. But this was really not the case. Wretched Faces exemplifies why that was: there was an absolute disaster, demographically, at the beginning of the 19th century, where you had extraordinarily widespread rural poverty, mostly because of the Corn Laws—which were imposed during the Napoleonic War to restrict imports, and kept the price of wheat very high—but partly because of continuing subsistence agriculture and the ongoing Little Ice Age. This is one of two books that really changed my approach to the whole subject of food. Because most books about the history of food focus on what the rich eat—just like most histories of fashion focus on that tiny one percent of society. And that’s fine, if you recognise that it’s all a daydream. But it doesn’t give you a good holistic picture of what the past was actually like. But I find history more interesting to research than English literature. There’s not really a lot of research in English literature. You can work on manuscripts in English literature, and that can get really interesting. But, actually, the interesting research in literature is really historical research—it’s just pretending not to be.

English Food by Diane Purkiss | Waterstones

We talked about how he found out about Richard Briggs and his book; the similarities and differences between life and cooking then and now; who may have influenced Briggs’ writing; his death; broiling and other older English words the Brits no longer use but North Americans do; authenticity; and much more. Banning BOGOFs won’t work either because they will simply become, buy two, get both half price, or whatever. That’s business – its their job to sell stuff.He is also talking at Chelsea History Festival on Friday 29 September 2023, at 6pm about the history of sugar: https://chelseahistoryfestival.com/ It’s interesting that the food revolution in Britain has been modelled on food cultures of France, Italy, Iberia: it’s all about the local, the local cheeses, breads, growers. That’s lovely, I’m not against it. But one reason it hasn’t percolated far down the food chain—we still eat more ultra-processed food than any other country in Europe—is because it’s inimical to the food culture we’ve historically tended to have, which is creolized dishes of the kind highlighted in Collingham’s book. And of course, there’s the evergreen subject of “the poor”, whose eating habits were fodder for criticism long before Tory MPs were telling the House of Commons that food banks would be unnecessary if such people would only learn to cook. In 1821 the radical William Cobbett dismissed women who bought, rather than made, their own bread as “wasteful … indeed shameful”, apparently giving no thought to the fuel and labour costs involved. The accounts of women going hungry to feed their children a century later also feel depressingly familiar. I really dislike that kind of historical approach, because it’s completely untrue to the way people behave. I mean, how rational is our current government, I ask you? In many respects, other things that were perhaps a bit more primal were probably at stake.