This author has not written his bio yet.
But we are proud to say that Penelope J. Corfield contributed 196 entries already.
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2012) Another way of thinking of influences (whether positive or negative) is to think of events lived through. There’s nothing like direct experience for augmenting or revising or contradicting the impact of books and people. By contrast with my parents, I haven’t lived through a […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) Thinking of influences, two very different historians influenced me not only through their originality but through their intellectual ‘bite’. They were nothing if not challenging. In that they were very alike, although otherwise they were very different. I tend to think of them as […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) Writing my father’s obituary recently, I began to muse about people who have influenced me, who emphatically include my parents. And then, in parallel, I began to think about books which had an impact on me; and decided to write about one unknown tome, […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) People often imagine that class barriers were more rigid in the past, notwithstanding historical fluctuations in social attitudes. As a result, it is always assumed that cross-class marriages were especially rare. Yet matters were never so simple. Among the many individuals in the past, […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) What’s a riot? Some people prefer to name the recent disorder in numerous English cities between 6-10 August 2011 as ‘looting sprees’. But there is no absolute right-or-wrong definition. Riots usually involve crowds in substantial numbers, who are flouting the law in a tumultuous […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) WHERE IS THE POLITICAL LEFT TODAY?1 2 Today’s political scene is a blurred rainbow. Gone are the old simplicities – if they were ever that simple – when one reactionary party of tradition and privilege (the Right) was confronted by one progressive party of […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) Why are many Humanities researchers so angry at the conduct of the Arts and Humanities Research Council? Its chief executive Prof. Rick Rylance has not yet managed to assuage his critics. They fear that the AHRC has not kept due operational distance from the […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) As the sorry tale of FIFA currently implies, oligarchies without external audit and accountability sooner or later get corrupted. So there was a serious principle as well as praxis behind the late Labour Government’s extension of the audit culture to so many aspects of […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) What follows is an account of the British Labour Party, organised not by chronology but in answer to three broad thematic questions: who support it? how is the Party organised? and what ideology does it represent? My commentary was first presented as a short […]
If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2011) I know that I am not the only person with an interest in and affection for Britain’s Universities, who is deeply worried by the Universities’ collective failure to stand up to successive central governments. Many people raise this point with me. There is a […]
Penelope J. Corfield is a historian, lecturer and education consultant. She recently served as the President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS).
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