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Watch the 2 videos and answer the questions on your notebook.

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After looking at the clip above, answer the following Questions. 1. How many children where in the Brontë family in total? 2. How did Charlotte cope with the death of her mother?

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Literature in the Victorian Era | A Historical Overview

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The Daily Life of a Victorian Lady | Victorian Era | Historical Resources

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It's not easy to write an academic essay.

Many students struggle to word their arguments in a logical and concise way.

To make matters worse, academic essays need to adhere to a certain level of formality, so we can't always use the same word choices in essay writing that we would use in daily life.

If you're struggling to choose the right words for your essay, don't worry-you've come to the right place!

In this article, we've compiled a list of over 300 words and phrases to use in the introduction, body, and conclusion of your essay.

Words to Use in the Essay Introduction

The introduction is one of the hardest parts of an essay to write.

You have only one chance to make a first impression, and you want to hook your reader. If the introduction isn't effective, the reader might not even bother to read the rest of the essay.

That's why it's important to be thoughtful and deliberate with the words you choose at the beginning of your essay.

Many students use a quote in the introductory paragraph to establish credibility and set the tone for the rest of the essay.

When you're referencing another author or speaker, try using some of these phrases:

Example: To use the words of Hillary Clinton, "You cannot have maternal health without reproductive health."

Near the end of the introduction, you should state the thesis to explain the central point of your paper.

If you're not sure how to introduce your thesis, try using some of these phrases:

In this essay, I will...

The purpose of this essay...

This essay discusses...

In this paper, I put forward the claim that...

There are three main arguments for...

Example: In this essay, I will explain why dress codes in public schools are detrimental to students.

After you've stated your thesis, it's time to start presenting the arguments you'll use to back up that central idea.

When you're introducing the first of a series of arguments, you can use the following words:

Example: First, consider the effects that this new social security policy would have on low-income taxpayers.

All these words and phrases will help you create a more successful introduction and convince your audience to read on.

Words to Use in the Body of the Essay

The body of your essay is where you'll explain your core arguments and present your evidence.

It's important to choose words and phrases for the body of your essay that will help the reader understand your position and convince them you've done your research.

Let's look at some different types of words and phrases that you can use in the body of your essay, as well as some examples of what these words look like in a sentence.

Transition Words and Phrases

Transitioning from one argument to another is crucial for a good essay.

It's important to guide your reader from one idea to the next so they don't get lost or feel like you're jumping around at random.

Transition phrases and linking words show your reader you're about to move from one argument to the next, smoothing out their reading experience. They also make your writing look more professional.

The simplest transition involves moving from one idea to a separate one that supports the same overall argument. Try using these phrases when you want to introduce a second correlating idea:

Additionally

In addition

Also

Secondly

Furthermore

Another key thing to remember

In the same way

Similarly

Likewise

Correspondingly

Example: Additionally, public parks increase property value because home buyers prefer houses that are located close to green, open spaces.

Another type of transition involves restating. It's often useful to restate complex ideas in simpler terms to help the reader digest them. When you're restating an idea, you can use the following words:

In other words

To put it another way

That is to say

To put it more simply

Example: "The research showed that 53% of students surveyed expressed a mild or strong preference for more on-campus housing. In other words, over half the students wanted more dormitory options."

Often, you'll need to provide examples to illustrate your point more clearly for the reader. When you're about to give an example of something you just said, you can use the following words:

For instance

To give an illustration of

To exemplify

To demonstrate

As evidence

Example: Humans have long tried to exert control over our natural environment. For instance, engineers reversed the Chicago River in 1900, causing it to permanently flow backward.

Sometimes, you'll need to explain the impact or consequence of something you've just said.

When you're drawing a conclusion from evidence you've presented, try using the following words:

Thus

As a result

Hence

Therefore

Accordingly

Due to

As you can see

This suggests that

It follows that

It can be seen that

For this reason

For all of those reasons

Consequently

Example: "There wasn't enough government funding to support the rest of the physics experiment. Thus, the team was forced to shut down their experiment in 1996."

When introducing an idea that bolsters one you've already stated, or adds another important aspect to that same argument, you can use the following words:

Example: The volcanic eruption disrupted hundreds of thousands of people. Moreover, it impacted the local flora and fauna as well, causing nearly a hundred species to go extinct.

Often, you'll want to present two sides of the same argument. When you need to compare and contrast ideas, you can use the following words:

On the one hand / on the other hand

Conversely

However

Alternatively

In contrast to

On the contrary

Whereas

By contrast

In comparison

Example: On the one hand, the Black Death was undoubtedly a tragedy because it killed millions of Europeans. On the other hand, it created better living conditions for the peasants who survived.

Finally, when you're introducing a new angle that contradicts your previous idea, you can use the following phrases:

Example: Shakespearean plays are classic works of literature that have stood the test of time. Having said that, I would argue that Shakespeare isn't the most accessible form of literature to teach students in the twenty-first century.

Good essays include multiple types of logic. You can use a combination of the transitions above to create a strong, clear structure throughout the body of your essay.

Strong Verbs for Academic Writing

Verbs are especially important for writing clear essays. Often, you can convey a nuanced meaning simply by choosing the right verb.

You should use strong verbs that are precise and dynamic. Whenever possible, you should use an unambiguous verb, rather than a generic verb.

For example, alter and fluctuate are stronger verbs than change, because they give the reader more descriptive detail.

Here are some useful verbs that will help make your essay shine.

Verbs that show change:

Verbs that relate to causing or impacting something:

Verbs that show increase:

Verbs that show decrease:

Verbs that relate to parts of a whole:

Verbs that show a positive stance:

Verbs that relate to drawing conclusions from evidence:

Verbs that relate to thinking and analysis:

Verbs that relate to showing information in a visual format:

Useful Adjectives and Adverbs for Academic Essays

You should use adjectives and adverbs more sparingly than verbs when writing essays, since they sometimes add unnecessary fluff to sentences.

However, choosing the right adjectives and adverbs can help add detail and sophistication to your essay.

Sometimes you'll need to use an adjective to show that a finding or argument is useful and should be taken seriously. Here are some adjectives that create positive emphasis:

Other times, you'll need to use an adjective to show that a finding or argument is harmful or ineffective. Here are some adjectives that create a negative emphasis:

Finally, you might need to use an adverb to lend nuance to a sentence, or to express a specific degree of certainty. Here are some examples of adverbs that are often used in essays:

Using these words will help you successfully convey the key points you want to express. Once you've nailed the body of your essay, it's time to move on to the conclusion.

Words to Use in Your Essay Conclusion

The conclusion of your paper is important for synthesizing the arguments you've laid out and restating your thesis.

In your concluding paragraph, try using some of these essay words:

Example: In conclusion, it's imperative that we take action to address climate change before we lose our coral reefs forever.

In addition to simply summarizing the key points from the body of your essay, you should also add some final takeaways. Give the reader your final opinion and a bit of a food for thought.

To place emphasis on a certain point or a key fact, use these essay words:

Example: Ada Lovelace is unquestionably a powerful role model for young girls around the world, and more of our public school curricula should include her as a historical figure.

These concluding phrases will help you finish writing your essay in a strong, confident way.

How to Improve Your Essay Writing Vocabulary

There are many useful essay words out there that we didn't include in this article, because they are specific to certain topics.

If you're writing about biology, for example, you will need to use different terminology than if you're writing about literature.

So how do you improve your vocabulary skills?

The vocabulary you use in your academic writing is a toolkit you can build up over time, as long as you take the time to learn new words.

One way to increase your vocabulary is by looking up words you don't know when you're reading.

Try reading more books and academic articles in the field you're writing about and jotting down all the new words you find. You can use these words to bolster your own essays.

You can also consult a dictionary or a thesaurus. When you're using a word you're not confident about, researching its meaning and common synonyms can help you make sure it belongs in your essay.

Don't be afraid of using simpler words. Good essay writing boils down to choosing the best word to convey what you need to say, not the fanciest word possible.

Finally, you can use ProWritingAid's synonym tool or essay checker to find more precise and sophisticated vocabulary. Click on weak words in your essay to find stronger alternatives.

There you have it: our compilation of the best words and phrases to use in your next essay. Good luck!

Take your writing to the next level:

Whether you are writing a novel, essay, article, or email, good writing is an essential part of communicating your ideas.

This guide contains the 20 most important writing tips and techniques from a wide range of professional writers.

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Words to Use in an Essay: 300 Essay Words

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It's not easy to write an academic essay. Many students struggle to word their arguments in a logical and concise way. To make matters worse, academic essays need to adhere to a certain level of formality, so we can't always use the same word choices in essay writing that we would use in daily life.

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OSU School of Writing, Literature and Film

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"What is Stream of Consciousness?": A Literary Guide for English Students and Teachers

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Camera Angles

Camera Shot Angle Overview

It's not enough to just understand shot size. Camera angles, and degree of those angles, can totally change the meaning of a shot. As you prepare your shot list, it helps to remember all the options. We're going to build a shot list using StudioBinder to highlight the various camera angles. Here's a quick video on how a shot list is created.

Here is a shot list with the different types of camera shot angles. We used some of the most iconic camera angles from films like , Do the Right Thing, and Pulp Fiction as a sort of cheatsheet. Can you guess what movies are represented here? Follow the image link to see the fully populated shot list, which you can also download and use for reference.

Now that's we've reviewed all the different types of camera angles in film, let's take a closer look at them one at a time.

Eye Level Shot Example

Eye Level Shot

Our first camera angle is the eye level shot, and this is when your subject is at eye-level. An eye level shot can result in a neutral perspective (not superior or inferior). This mimics how we see people in real life - our eye line connecting with theirs, and it can break down boundaries.

Here's an example of the eye level camera angle:

Eye Level Shot Example * Game of Thrones

Eye level shots are actually much less standard than one might initially think, because directors often prefer to place the camera at shoulder level to attain a much more cinematic look.

Low Angle SHOT Example

Low Angle Shot

A low angle shot shot frames the subject from below a their eyeline. These camera shots most often emphasize power dynamics between characters - a low angle shot on one character is often paired with a high angle shot on the other character.

Here's an example of the low angle camera angle:

Low Angle Shot * The Matrix

Low angle camera shots are a perfect camera angle for signaling superiority or to elicit feelings of fear and dread. Here's a video that dives deeper into the various low angle shot examples and how they have been used by filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Orson Welles, and Spike Jonze.

In your next shot list, when you've got a character who is powerful (or at least feeling powerful), consider the low angle shot. It will bring that extra bit of meaning to your shot.

High Angle Shot Example

High Angle Shot

In a high angle shot, the camera points down at your subject. It usually creates a feeling of inferiority, or "looking down" on your subject. But, again, with every other camera angle, there are many applications.

Here's an example of the high angle camera angle:

High Angle Shot Example * Avengers

Here is our video on how you can use high angle shots in your film. But, as the video below shows, there are the standard and more creative expressions of the high angle shot.

The high angle shot is a versatile shot that can be used in many situations. The most common usage is to make a character seem vulnerable and powerless but there are always exceptions to the rule.

Hip Level Shot Example

The Cowboy Shot or Hip Level Shot

A Cowboy shot is when your camera is roughly waist-high. Hip level shots are often useful when one subject is seated while the other stands.

Hip level shots can also be extremely useful camera angles for when you have action that occurs near the hip, like weapons being drawn, or someone reaching into their pocket. That's why it's also known as a "cowboy shot" - we can't think of hip level shots without seeing a gun, holster, and the enemy ahead in the distance.

Here's an example of the hip level camera angle:

Hip Level Shot Example * Punch-Drunk Love

The further away you get from the subject, like in this moment from Punch-Drunk Love, to keep the subject framed with proper head room, a hip level shot will get the job done.

Knee Level Shot Example

Knee Level Shot

This is when your camera height is about as low as your subject's knees. They can emphasize a character's superiority if paired with a low angle. It's not as extreme as a ground level shot but it gets the same feeling across. These are ideal when you want to focus on characters walking, or in this case from , creeping.

Here's an example of the knee level camera angle:

Knee Level Shot * Home Alone

Ground Level Shot Example

Ground Level Shot

A ground level shot is when your camera's height is on ground level with your subject. This camera angle is used a lot to feature a character walking without revealing their face, but it can help to make the viewer more active and use the actor's performance to build an idea.

Here's an example of the ground level camera angle:

Ground Level Shot Example * Burn After Reading

Shoulder Level Shot Example

Shoulder Level Shot

A shoulder level shot is a camera angle that is as high as your subject's shoulders. Shoulder level shots are actually much more standard than an eye level shot, which can make your actor seem shorter than reality.

Here's an example of the shoulder level camera angle:

Shoulder Level Shot * Black Panther

Because the camera is aligned with the shoulder, it allows the actor's head to reach the top of the frame (reducing head room). It also places the actor's eye-line slightly above the camera, and, in turn, the illusion of a slightly lower angle.

Dutch Angle Example

Dutch Angle or Dutch Tilt Shot

For a Dutch angle (Dutch tilt), the camera is slanted to one side. With the horizon lines tilted in this way, you can create a sense of disorientation, a de-stabilized mental state, or increase the tension.

Here's an example of the Dutch angle camera angle:

Dutch Angle Camera Angle * StudioBinder

Here's a video example of the Dutch angle camera angle focusing on the precise moment to use one. Watch as the scene begins with "level" and "normal" shots before switching to Dutch angles for maximum impact.

Think of the Dutch angle as "emphasis" for any tense or subjective moment. It's a great way to amplify whatever emotion, mental state, or suspense you're bringing to the scene.

Overhead Shot Example

Overhead Shot or Bird's Eye View

An overhead shot is from above, looking down on your subject. These are typically shot from 90 degrees above - anything less might be considered a high angle shot instead.

An overhead shot doesn't need to be super high, but it can be. Here's an example of the overhead shot camera angle:

Overhead Shot Camera Angle * StudioBinder

Overhead shots are great for providing perspective on a scene - but not just any perspective. It's often used as either a "neutral" or sometimes "divine" point of view.

Aerial Shot Example

Aerial Shot

An aerial shot, whether taken from a helicopter or drone, is captured from way up high. It establishes a large expanse of scenery. Many of the helicopter shots in Black Hawk Down are aerial shots.

Here's an example of the aerial shot camera angle:

Aerial Shot Example * Black Hawk Down

Affordable drones have made aerial photography more accessible to filmmakers. Once considered a big-budget luxury or stock-footage mainstay, original aerial photography is now within reach of almost any production, all thanks to the "rise" of drones (and Sky-net).

UP NEXT

The Complete Guide to Camera Shots

Camera angles are very important in visual storytelling but they are just the beginning of the options available. When you find yourself prepping a shot list, remember shot size, framing, focus, and camera movement. When filmmakers can combine these elements into a single shot for the right reasons, that's when iconic moments in film are born. If you'd like to see our entire list of camera shots in film, make sure to continue onto the next post.

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Watch: Every Camera Angle Explained [Video Essay]

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A complete list of the different types of camera angles in film. We also provide you with camera shot angle examples and a shot list for download.

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Revisiting The Searchers : The worst best movie

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Revisiting The Searchers : The worst best movie

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The Searchers, John Ford's epic 1956 Western, is a film geek's paradise: It is preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring. Impossible to enjoy, and yet not as obviously medicinal as, say, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Searchers segregates the initiated from the uninitiated; and so it is widely considered, by the initiated, at least, to be among the four or five best movies of all time. At his maiden screening, a young Cahiers du Cinema critic named Jean-Luc Godard wept, later adding, "How can I hate John Wayne ... and yet love him tenderly ... in the last reel of ?" Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader routinely name as one of their favorite films, adding, "I see it once or even twice a year" (Scorsese), or, "I make sure to see The Searchers at least once a year" (Schrader), though such encomia have the curious effect of making the movie sound dutiful and unpleasant, like a prostate exam. Maybe the analogy isn't so outlandish as it seems.

Even its adherents regard The Searchers as something of an excruciating necessity. The film, which is now out in a plush new DVD re-release, tells the story of Ethan Edwards, an Ahab-like obsessive who spends seven years searching for his little niece Debbie, kidnapped by Comanche Indians. ("Co-mansh," in Ethan's defiant pronunciation.) As played by John Wayne, Ethan is an embarrassing relic, a man who once fought proudly for the Confederacy and who now glories in his hatred of Indians. Ethan's racism may be cloddishly depicted, but it's the source of all the movie's kinky allure. Ethan wants to find Debbie not to rescue her but to kill her for having been contaminated by what Ethan imagines to be her society, such as it is, with Indians. "She's been living with a buck," spits Ethan, referring to Debbie's probable marriage to Scar, the Indian warrior-chief who engineered her theft. *

Coming to The Searchers for the first time, I was surprised at how fidgeted-together this supposedly great film is, how weird its quilting is, of unregenerate violence with doltish comic set pieces, all pitched against Ford's signature backdrop, the buttes and spires of Monument Valley. Though visually magnificent, the movie is otherwise off-putting to the contemporary sensibility, what with its when men were men, and women were hysterics mythos and an acting style that often appears frozen in tintype. (Hank Worden's turn, as the lovable village idiot, is particularly gruesome in this respect.) Not coincidentally, pop critics like Pauline Kael, who found much in the film "awkward," "static," and "corny," and Roger Ebert, who finds the movie flawed and "nervous," have been the most vocal dissenters in the cult of The Searchers. Its reputation lies elsewhere, with two influential and mutually reinforcing constituencies: critics whose careers emerged out of the rise of "film studies" as a discrete and self-respecting academic discipline, and the first generation of filmmakers-Scorsese and Schrader, but also Francis Ford Coppola, John Milius, and George Lucas-whose careers began in film school. The hosanna chorus for The Searchers is impossible to imagine, in other words, without the formalized presence of film in the university curriculum. The question, then, is: Why did the curriculum attach so intensely to so obviously flawed a movie?

That Ford should be admired and dissected by a legion of academics would have been amusing to Ford, a self-styled man's man (and by many accounts, a self-styled drunk's drunk) who once said, "My name is John Ford. I make Westerns," as laconic a kiss-off to one's nerd-cultists as one could imagine. But of course, it is Ford's status, and even more so Wayne's, as troubling anachronisms that help levitate the reputation of The Searchers. For everything in The Searchers can be said to be "problematized," that favored term of art for film and culture studies, starting with the old standbys race and gender but moving on quickly to Wayne and Ford themselves. As has been pointed out, Wayne's image, a vital component of which had been made in war films like Back to Bataan and The Sands of Iwo Jima, films contemporary to a popular war, was in serious decline by the 1970s; and that image, the distillation of white American machismo, was not surviving an unpopular war intact. (Both Ford and Wayne were vocal supporters of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam.) The argument that Ford, and by extension Wayne, set about in the mid-'50s to "subvert" (another film-studies byword) their own meticulously constructed personas as defenders of a heroic code of the unsettled West was first floated in the early days of film studies, and has been catnip to the institutional critic ever since.

For what The Searchers fails to provide (by way of pleasure) to a paying audience is well-compensated for by what it offers up (by way of raw material) to the interpretation factory. Every woman in the film is a tautly drawn and sexless pioneer wife, until we finally see the Comanche-adopted Debbie, played by the ravishing Natalie Wood. "These are my people," says little Debbie, now not so little and quite the stone fox in her snug Comanche outfit. "Unt-mea. Go. Go." Later, in the climax of the film, Ethan finally has Debbie in his sights. He has scalped-though not himself killed-his nemesis, Scar, but does not know that Debbie has at last consented to return to white society. And so he prepares, gun drawn, to exterminate her. I stand with the detractors of this silly film, but what follows must count as one of the more thrilling moments in anyone's movie-watching life. Wayne places his hands under the terrified Natalie Wood's armpits, then raises her up to the sky, examining her-murderously? Paternally? He then drops her into his arms and utters his first soft words of the film: "Let's go home, Debbie."

Now, "Why didn't he kill her?" is right up there with "Why does Hamlet dither?" and "Did the governess really see Quint and Miss Jessel?" as one of the great seminar unanswerables; it is sure to keep discussion going for the allotted 50 minutes, along with: Wait, why did he want to kill her in the first place? Was he in love with Debbie's mother, his milquetoast of a dead brother's dead wife? Why is Debbie the only hint of good sex in the movie? Are Ethan and Scar doppelgängers? Does Ethan spare Debbie because the scalping of Scar has purged him of his own most perturbing desires? Who knows? In later years, Wayne was asked about the strange depth of Ethan's obsession. "He did what he had to do," answered Wayne, mangling the basic details of the plot. "The Indians fucked his wife." A movie made by semiprimitives will submit more docilely to extensive Rorschaching than a self-consciously dark and mature Western like Little Big Man or McCabe and Mrs. Miller. As is so often the case, Kael deserves the last word: "You can read a lot into The Searchers, but it isn't very enjoyable."

Well, not quite the last word. Why did The Searchers become, as one critic has put it, the "Super-Cult movie of the New Hollywood," inspiring such '70s classics as Star Wars, Taxi Driver, and Hardcore? In styling themselves as something other than well-credentialed nerds, the first generation of film school grads to take over Hollywood had two archetypes of directorial cool to draw upon-the sly European émigré (Wilder, Lubitsch, von Stroheim, Lang) or the homegrown American he-man (Ford, Huston, Hawks). They sampled liberally from both, of course, but in Ford's Ethan the avatars of New Hollywood found a very romantic allegory for the director as monomaniacal obsessive, on a quest that others along the way may only find perverse. Ethan was reborn in Travis Bickle, et al., because Ethan and Travis Bickle were means for allowing otherwise unworldly men to live out, vicariously, an earlier romance of moviemaking, before filmmakers pedigreed themselves with advanced degrees. (Ford hadn't gone to film school; he started as a studio ditch-digger.) Ah ha! So that is why Ethan doesn't kill Debbie! Because at the end of the day, the half-crazed auteur must finally give way to the crowd-pleaser, right? And so when Wayne finally hunts down Debbie, only to raise her up, it's a moment of pure cinema. ...Well, I don't know. And neither did John Ford.
* Correction, July 14, 2006: In the original version of this article, a quote was misattributed to the main character in The Searchers, Ethan Edwards. The quotation has been removed. Click here to return to the corrected paragraph.

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The Searchers, John Ford's epic 1956 Western, is a film geek's paradise: It is preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring.

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John Ford's 1956 film is praised for elements that aren't there.

T he greatest Western of all time . . . isn't. Though The Searchers is regularly hailed as the finest exemplar of its genre and one of the best movies of any kind (seventh-best of all time, according to the decennial Sight & Sound poll), John Ford's 1956 film is mediocre for most of its run time. Nearly all of the praise heaped on it stems from two elements: its closing minutes (notably its ambiguous but beautiful final shot, one of the most enduring in cinema history) and the uncharacteristic brutishness of John Wayne's portrayal of the film's hero Ethan Edwards. The acclaim comes from obsessives who have seen the movie so many times that they see things that simply aren't there, often motivated by a leftist loathing of American mythology that, to put it mildly, Ford and Wayne did not share. A conventional midcentury Western somehow became the Left's favorite cowboys-and-Indians allegory, a metaphor for , McCarthyism, and the civil-rights .

Decide for yourself ( The Searchers is running on the Watch TCM app and related on-demand service until April 19), but then compare it to my favorite traditionalist Western, Wayne's vastly superior 1948 epic Red River (streaming on Amazon Prime).

Apart from its stunning Monument Valley photography, The Searchers is mostly hokey and thinly written. (Spoilers follow.) Wayne's Ethan Edwards, a returning Confederate soldier, stops at his brother's frontier house in West Texas in 1868 and takes an immediate dislike to the brother's adopted son Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) because the youth has slightly darker skin indicating some Indian ancestry. In a Comanche raid, everyone but Martin and Ethan is either killed or taken captive, and the two men spend five years tracking the chief, Scar (Henry Brandon), to find Ethan's missing niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood). By the time they find her, she is fully assimilated into the Comanche and doesn't want to return to the whites. Ethan decides that she's been polluted by miscegenation and tries to kill her, stopped by Martin. The closing minutes of the film contain two sudden, unexplained changes of heart: Debbie resolves to return to the whites, and Ethan decides to rescue her instead of murder her, seemingly on the spur of the moment.

Ford was primarily a painter of tableaus, and like many of his films, this one suffers from dialogue that is almost entirely flat and functional. Max Steiner's score is typically overbearing and melodramatic. The acting (especially by Hunter) is mostly terrible. A scene in which the searchers meet two women who have been rendered hysterical after capture by the Indians is so broadly played that it's practically camp. The romance between Martin and his frontier sweetheart, Laurie, is leaden. The slapstick humor (such as when Ethan kicks an Indian woman down a hill or when Martin falls over the same bench twice) is excruciating. Unlike in Howard Hawks's Red River, Wayne's character doesn't have a well-crafted arc, just a sudden lurch from fury to kindness, and there is no comparing the depth of the Ethan-Martin bond with the one between Thomas (Wayne) and Matt (Montgomery Clift) in the earlier film. Red River is Shakespearean. The Searchers is merely pretty.

The Searchers was largely dismissed upon its release, famously earning zero Oscar nominations. The original New York Times review by Bosley Crowther approaches it entirely in genre terms, calling it a "slambang Western" and noting, "for all the suspicions aroused by excessive language in its ads, [it] is really a rip-snorting Western, as brashly entertaining as they come . . . a wealth of Western action that has the toughness of leather and the sting of a whip." Of Ethan, Crowther says his "passion for revenge is magnificently uncontaminated by caution or sentiment." So: the opposite of complicated.

We'll allow that Bosley Crowther was a bit of a ninny. But who in 1956 would have had a much different take? The film began its upward reappraisal in 1959, when the influential critic turned filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard began singing hosannas to it, calling it the fourth-best American film of the sound era in 1963 and comparing it to The Odyssey. In the post-Vietnam era, critics began to be tickled by Ethan's racial animus. He not only despises the Comanche, he obsessively learns their ways and imitates them. Minutes before the film ends, he scalps Scar. There is a rough moral equivalence to each side's bloodlust, which was unusual for the era's films.

Yet Ford doesn't explore the agony of an endless cycle of vengeance, as in Unforgiven. Nor does he take an ironic view that American heroes can be psychotic, as The Searchers' superfan Martin Scorsese does in Taxi Driver, essentially a Times Square take on Ford's film. Far from being the Captain Ahab of the frontier, Ethan Edwards is not, in context, insane. His hatred and virulence toward Comanches constitute repayment in kind for their brutality, and that's exactly how moviegoers of the 1950s would have seen the movie. (That Wayne named one of his sons after Ethan is a giveaway that he didn't think the character was unjustly cruel.) If Ethan is racist, the film doesn't punish him for it or indicate that he has changed his outlook. At the end of the film, he has simply changed his mind about the wisdom of summarily executing a defenseless teen girl. That's an exceedingly low standard for redemption, and there's no indication that he's learned anything more.

Ah, but what about that final shot? Do the last 30 seconds constitute a refutation and reversal of everything we've seen in the preceding hour and 59 minutes? I don't think so. Ford didn't disguise his themes. As Ethan delivers Debbie "home" (not really; all he has done is brought her to the nearest white people), he remains outside the doorway, pauses, then turns and walks away alone. The door closes on him, seemingly by itself. You could read into this scene an indication that Ethan grasps the soul-stain of his unreasoning hatred, understands that he is unfit for civilized company. Left-wing critics swoon at the thought: The ultimate American movie hero, and the ultimate conservative, stands revealed as a horrible racist! " The Searchers " is steeped in pathology - not just the director's, but ours," writes the leftist critic J. Hoberman. "No American movie has ever so directly addressed the psychosexual underpinnings of racism or advanced a protagonist so consumed by race hatred. . . . Ethan takes America's sins - racism, cruelty, violence, intolerance - onto himself."

That isn't what Ford intended. Ethan has been a loner for the whole movie; at the outset, he refuses to take an oath to join the Texas Rangers. The mythopoetic figure of a solitary avenger on the plain strikes deep American chords, but if there is a plaintive element to that, the film doesn't indict Ethan for who he is. Ethan Edwards is not what critics see in him: the personification of genocide, racism, or derangement about sexual purity. As Ford and Wayne see it, he has simply done what had to be done to restore order in a barbaric time. It's a lonely calling. He doesn't enter the household because he's no longer needed there, not because he feels shame. His next step will be another adventure, not atonement.

Kyle Smith is a fellow at National Review Institute and National Review's critic-at-large. @rkylesmith

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Everyone Is Wrong about "The Searchers" | National Review

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John Ford's 1956 film is praised for elements that aren't there. T he greatest Western of all time . . . isn't. Though The Searchers is regularly hailed as the finest exemplar of its genre and one of the best movies of any kind (seventh-best of all time, according to the decennial Sight & Sound poll), John Ford's 1956 film is mediocre for most of its run time.

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Voici une fiche d’anglais très précise sur les mots de liaison en anglais. Découvrez leur sens, leur utilité et apprenez à les utiliser.

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The Searchers is a landmark Hollywood western from John Ford, probably the best of the bunch. It's a Technicolor marvel in shades of psychological grey, a revisionist take on the myth of manifest destiny. It's full of savagery and tragedy, blood and thunder. I know this because I've read all about it and this made me feel I knew the film in advance. But either the critics were wrong or I had bamboozled myself. The Searchers was my all-time favourite western until the moment I saw it.

Ford's 1956 film casts foursquare John Wayne in the role of foursquare Ethan Edwards, a civil war veteran on the trail of murderous Comanche. Edwards is in pursuit of his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), who was abducted as a child and now lives as a squaw of Scar, the chief. Except that it turns out that Edwards does not want to rescue Debbie, he wants to murder her, because what she has done so offends his sense of decency. "Living with a Comanche ain't living," he says. And just writing this paragraph, I find that I'm excited all over again.

Edwards searches for Debbie for years and years; I searched for The Searchers for 12 months or so. The more I read about it, the more I wanted to find it. The plot sounded tremendous and everyone else seemed to love it. The Searchers is one of Martin Scorsese's favourite films. It influenced David Lean and Steven Spielberg (and latterly the final episode of Breaking Bad). Jean-Luc Godard hailed it as "a Homeric odyssey", while the critic Greil Marcus likened Ethan to Captain Ahab, an American hero gone mad. In pursuing the monster, he becomes the monster himself.

One Sunday afternoon I found a film called The Searchers and it bore a passing resemblance to the film I'd been chasing. But it was as if The Searchers had died on the trail and then been boiled down and made into a soup. Here was John Wayne just being John Wayne, waddling through the action with none of the nuance or conflict that Ethan is meant to embody. He says he wants to save Debbie. Then he says he wants to kill Debbie. And then he says to Debbie, "Let's go home." But he might as well be reading his lines off a cue card. I don't think he understands the man he is playing or the story he's telling.

Worse, I'm not entirely convinced that the director does either. Ford, of course, was one of the great myth-makers of the wild west. He "printed the legend" and mapped out the frontier (on screen if not physically). As a young man, he played a KKK horseman in The Birth of a Nation and typically viewed US history as a war against barbarism, the taming of the wilderness. The white men were the good guys; the people of colour the beasts.

On The Searchers, significantly, he tried something new. For perhaps the first time, Ford entertained the possibility that the settlers and the Native Americans might be as bad as each other - or, to put it another way, that by scalping his victims, angry Ethan Edwards was no better than a Red Indian savage. That's progress of a sort, although the journey is shuffling, conflicted and doesn't go far enough. It's fine for Ford to be ambivalent about the material; ambivalence can lead us to fascinating places. In this case, however, the confusion serves only to dampen the drama. Wayne is all wrong and the tone is a mess. It feels as if Ford is cooking the right kind of movie with the wrong set of ingredients.

So what happened next? My suspicion is that critics and fans stepped in to complete the film for him. They saw the direction The Searchers was going and rushed to convince themselves that it had achieved what it set out to do (or at least what they believed it had set out to do). They misinterpreted a tentative shuffle-step as a giant leap forward and hailed the film as a revisionist masterpiece as opposed to a stumbling reconnaissance.

When we sit down in a cinema, we are often watching two pictures: the picture on screen and the one we want it to be. Sometimes the picture on screen surpasses our expectations; it blows off the roof and lifts us up with it. But other times it does not. When I tracked down The Searchers I truly wanted to love it; I believed that I would. But I had read too much and thought too much, to the point where I'd dreamed up a whole different movie (possibly one scripted by Cormac McCarthy). So if Ford's film felt like a let-down, that's not really its fault. I'm blaming the critics: they spoiled The Searchers for me.
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The Searchers is a landmark Hollywood western from John Ford, probably the best of the bunch. It's a Technicolor marvel in shades of psychological grey, a revisionist take on the myth of manifest destiny. It's full of savagery and tragedy, blood and thunder.

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argaret Atwood's evergreen dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is about to become a television drama. Published in 1985, it couldn't feel more fresh or more timely, dealing as it does with reproductive rights, with the sudden accession to power of a theocracy in the United States, with the demonisation of imagined, pantomime villain "Islamic fanatics". But then, feminist science fiction does tend to feel fresh - its authors have a habit of looking beyond their particular historical moment, analysing the root causes, suggesting how they might be, if not solved, then at least changed.

Where does the story of feminist science fiction begin? There are so many possible starting points: Margaret Cavendish's 1666 book The Blazing World, about an empress of a utopian kingdom; one could point convincingly to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an exploration of how men could "give birth" and what might happen if they did; one could recall the 1905 story "Sultana's Dream" by Begum Rokeya, about a gender-reversed India in which it's the men who are kept in purdah.

And perhaps one of the starting points was here: on 29 August 1911, a 50-year-old man, a member of the Yahi group of the Native American Yana people, walked out of the forest near Oroville, California, and was captured by the local sheriff. He was known at the time and popularised in the press as "the last wild Indian".

He called himself "Ishi" - a word in the Yahi language that means simply "man". He was the very last of his people, and had been living in the wilderness alone, travelling to places he remembered from the time when his tribe had flourished, in the hope of finding some remnant of those he'd grown up with. When he realised they were truly all gone, when a series of forest fires meant he was close to starvation, he allowed himself to be found and taken in.

Knowing that he was the last surviving Yahi, Ishi was desperate to communicate some of the culture that would be entirely lost when he was gone. He ended up living with the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of California, Alfred Kroeber. He taught Kroeber as much as he could: demonstrated the skills of flint-knapping, explained his language, told the stories of his people one last time so they could be written down and preserved. He was particularly fond of children, Kroeber recorded. Ishi died in 1916, of tuberculosis. After his death, Alfred's wife, Theodora, wrote a remarkable book about him, Ishi in Two Worlds, which relays as much of the Yahi culture as the anthropologists were able to record, and talks about Ishi's own accounts of his life. To read it is to touch an intricate and beautiful civilisation that is now entirely gone, a place that can only be momentarily resurrected by an imaginative act, as unreachable as an alien world.

And the link with feminist science fiction? Theodora and Alfred Kroeber's daughter was Ursula Le Guin, the science fiction author. Her novel The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969, at the start of the revolutionary women's movement, and was one of the earliest pieces of feminist SF. It is about a man from Earth who travels to the planet Gethen, where the people have no fixed gender. He is by turns fascinated, appalled and deeply, sickeningly lonely. Everyone's "normality" is someone else's wilderness.

Theocratic state ... in The Handmaid's Tale, a Christian sect call the Sons of Jacob take over. Photograph: Hulu

The association between some writers of feminist science fiction and the wilderness is surprisingly strong, in fact. Atwood grew up spending a large portion of each year in the Quebec woods. Her father was an entomologist - an insect man with a specialism in the solitary bee - who worked on ways to protect the Canadian forest industry from insect damage. Atwood's early life included springs, summers and early autumns in a log cabin in the woods with no electricity, paddling canoes across clear forest lakes and cooking on an open fire. Alice Sheldon - who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree Jr, and after whom the James Tiptree Jr award for science fiction or fantasy explorations of gender is named - travelled extensively as a child among African peoples including the Kikuyu. Her parents were Herbert, an explorer, and Mary, a travel writer and war correspondent.

What makes Atwood's novel so terrifying is that it's all plausible. In fact, everything has happened somewhere before

Of course, not every author of feminist science fiction was taught how to make a fire in the wilderness by her (or his) parents. But what interests me, and what links these stories, I think, is the sense of young people having been exposed early on to the idea that there are other ways of living which are equally valid, equally worthy of respect, equally troubling and equally beautiful. That other cultures and modes of existence make sense on their own terms. That however you've grown up, it would always be possible to do things differently. And having seen that, one can't help reflecting on what the world would be like if we did decide to do things radically differently. Feminist - or let's say gender-questioning - science fiction asks insistently, through careful construction of different societies, how much of what we think now, today, in generic western culture about men and women is innate in the human species and how much is just invented. And if we've invented it then could we, for better or worse, invent it differently?

The answers are often dystopian. The Handmaid's Tale is probably the most famous work of feminist speculative fiction ever published; certainly it's one with a huge and appreciative audience outside the borders of the "genre" science fiction and fantasy readership. It takes place in Gilead, a fundamentalist theocratic state in New England in which a Christian sect, "the Sons of Jacob", has taken control. There's been a precipitous decline in the birth rate, and the state has reverted to the biblical model of reproduction: powerful men have fertile young "handmaids" to bear children who will then belong to them and their wives. The novel follows one such handmaid, Offred - a name that sounds appealingly Anglo-Saxon until you realise it means "Of Fred", Fred being the man who owns her. I read the novel as a teenager (a teenage Orthodox Jew, in fact) and realised very suddenly and certainly that if I were ever to get married I couldn't possibly change my name, that I would never be able to hear it as anything but "Offred" from then on.

What makes The Handmaid's Tale so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible. In fact, everything - like the stratagem of the handmaids - has happened somewhere before. Everything in it has been praised by someone as the right, the good, the best, the only way to live. And Atwood had a horrifyingly prescient eye for how a state like Gilead could come to exist: "... after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time ... Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The road-blocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful." Eventually, women's bank accounts are frozen, taken away from them, women are fired from their jobs. It happens step by step. How do you boil a frog? You turn the heat up slowly.

Fighting the politics of fear ... a placard at Donald Trump's inauguration inspired by Atwood's novel. Photograph: Sarah Pinsker

The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time. On the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, one popular placard read "Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again". There's no gain the women's movement has made that can't be taken away - a fact that will sound terrifying to some and a gleeful plan of action to others.

Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable. In Joanna Russ's novel The Female Man, four women from four parallel worlds meet, travelling from world to world to see how their lives could have been different under a different system. The most sexist of all the realities she explores is also the one that is most economically depressed. It's Jeannine, the woman from the world where the Depression never ended, who is so ground down that she barely believes she can exist without finding a man to marry her. Economic downturns make vulnerable people more vulnerable - and societies in trouble tend to retreat to an imagined past of certainty and stability. To put it another way: justice feels affordable in times of plenty, and starts to feel like a luxury in times of want. But anarchy can lead to new opportunities. In Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, in which a young woman with "hyperempathy" founds a new religious order, people are hungry for change because the old ways haven't worked, the US is plagued by deadly weather patterns that kill hundreds, and civilisation has collapsed to the point that it's "crazy to live without a wall to protect you". Feminist science fiction does have a way of finding resonances in the modern world.

Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side. Everyone's shining city on a hill is someone else's hell on earth

Marge Piercy's 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time offers another two possible futures, one utopian, one dystopian. Connie Ramos has been released from a mental hospital; she's seeing visions of the future, which might be real or might be delusional. In one future, the human race has somehow managed to come to its senses about all kinds of prejudice, learning how to value the rich diversity of life - gay and straight, male and female, all ethnicities and physical characteristics. As one character says, when discussing valuing one trait over another in reproduction: "It's one choice to breed carrots for our uses - especially leaving wild and variant gene pools intact. Is another to breed ourselves for some uses or imagined uses! For all we know, a new ice age comes and we might better breed for furriness than mathematical ability!" It's a pointed lesson when contrasted with Connie's visions of a dystopian future, where women are "cosmetically fixed for sex use", and people boast about which multinational corporation owns them. The astonishing thing about considering Woman on the Edge of Time now is how we've inched closer to both her worlds in the 40 years since the novel was published. Yes, you can get cosmetic "fillers" on any high street. Yes, corporations continue to grow in power as if they were living things, merging and combining abilities. And at the same time it also doesn't feel astonishing to read a scene of two men flirting and dancing together as it might have done in 1976. Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side, even in the same moment. Which one you're in depends entirely on your point of view.

'Is my novel dystopian? Only if you're a man' ... Naomi Alderman. Photograph: Felix Clay

My latest novel, , has been described as a dystopian thriller. In it, almost all the women in the world suddenly develop the power to electrocute people at will (they can electrocute women as well as men; also animals and inanimate objects - I based it on what electric eels do). And they use their power, slowly but surely, just as men do in our world today. Some of them are kind and some cruel. Some rape and some just have a jolly good time in bed with willing participants. Nothing happens to men in the novel - I explain carefully to interviewers - that is not happening to a woman in our world today. So is it dystopian? Well. Only if you're a man.

That answer's too simple, of course. It's pat, and gets a laugh from an audience, but the relationship between our world and utopias or dystopias of all stripes is a complicated one. Can we make a perfect state, where everyone is happy and agrees that things are being run in the best of all possible ways? Equally, could we create a place that everyone would agree is evil and morally bankrupt? We're a diverse bunch, human beings. Which helps explain that thing you cannot do for all of the people all of the time.

Le Guin has a beautiful long short story that I'd encourage anyone to read. It's called "The Matter of Seggri" and it draws - as so much of her work does - on her deep sympathy with the position of the anthropologist, there to observe and understand, not judge and solve. Seggri is an alien world; it's so much easier to do thought experiments about an alien world, it's clean and isolates precisely the problem you want to talk about. Human beings on Seggri are born physically just like human beings are here, with only one significant difference: "there are 16 adult women for every adult man. One conception in six or so is male, but a lot of non-viable male foetuses and defective male births bring it down to one in 16 by puberty." And this tweak changes everything. Women on Seggri marry each other - you can't hoard the men for just one woman. Instead the men live in a "fuckery" and do athletics to show off their muscles. "All they're allowed to do ... is compete at games and sports ... Nothing else. No options. No trades. No skills of making. They aren't allowed into the colleges to gain any kind of freedom of mind." People on Seggri say: "Men have to be sheltered from education for their own good." Meanwhile, women set up home together, pursue their interests and hire a man occasionally for fun or to father a child. As one anthropologist character observes of Seggri: "Men have all the privilege and women have all the power."

What I love about this story is how clear-eyed it is that all societies - at least all thus far constructed - leave something out. At a certain point in the story, one woman grieves over the curious behaviour of a fuckery boy who had fallen in love with her and wanted to be free to live only with her. "She thought, 'My life is wrong.' But she did not know how to make it right." It's a heartbreaking moment. So often when one's life seems wrong, it's the world that is wrong. But we do not know how to make it right.

Which brings us back to Ishi. He knew in 1911 that all his people were dead, that he would starve if he did not surrender himself to the alien force that had destroyed his family and laid waste his land. But 1911 was not a terrible year for everyone. The New York Public Library was opened that year, Orville Wright set a new world record for glider flight, and Ronald Reagan was born - that was probably nice for his parents at least.

Reagan famously described his vision of an America that would be a "shining city upon a hill" - a beacon of light and hope, a place that could show the world how to be better, an inspiration to all. A utopia. So let's put those two things side by side and regard them for a moment. Reagan is a baby in the cradle, Ishi is in the forest, accepting that the Yahi people are gone for ever, wiped out by the settlers. Everyone's shining city on a hill is someone else's hell on earth.

Every utopia contains a dystopia. Every dystopia contains a utopia. The conclusion I've come to through extensive speculative fiction voyaging is that the best we can hope for, probably, is to create a society that tries hard not to leave people out. And to be vigilantly alert to the people we are leaving out, whoever they are. To listen. To try to make it right as often as we can. To imagine how it could be different. And as to whether The Power is a dystopia? Well, as nothing happens to a man in it that's not happening to a woman right now, if my novel is a dystopia, we're living in a dystopia today.

The Handmaid's Tale will be broadcast in April. Naomi Alderman's The Power is published by Viking. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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Dystopian dreams: how feminist science fiction predicted the future

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argaret Atwood's evergreen dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is about to become a television drama. Published in 1985, it couldn't feel more fresh or more timely, dealing as it does with reproductive rights, with the sudden accession to power of a theocracy in the United States, with the demonisation of imagined, pantomime villain "Islamic fanatics".

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Learn English with our free online listening, grammar, vocabulary and reading activities. Practise your English and get ready for your Cambridge English exam.

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American Progress is a painting by John Gast which was uploaded on June 6th, 2017. The painting may be purchased as wall art, home decor, apparel, phone cases, greeting cards, and more. All products are produced on-demand and shipped worldwide within 2 - 3 business days.

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Free Indirect Speech

What is free indirect speech?

Free indirect speech is also called free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or discours indirect libre in French.

While indirect speech conveys the reported statement in the words of the reporter, with verbs generally 'backshifted' as far as the tense is concerned and changes in pronouns and adverbials of time and place are made to align with the time of reporting; free direct speech lacks a reporting clause to show the shift from narration to reporting. It is often used in fiction to represent the mental reactions of characters to what they see or experience. 1

The French narrative theorist Gerard Genette described free indirect speech as follows:

"The narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances then are merged." 2

Indirect speech vs free indirect speech

Similarities:

Free indirect speech resembles indirect speech in shifting tenses and other references.

Differences:

There is generally no reporting clause in free indirect speech and it retains some features of direct speech (such as direct questions and vocatives. i.e. expressions of direct address -as in 'I don't know, John').

Examples:

Direct speech:

He sat down on the sofa carelessly. "Why are they asking me to contribute to the project?" he asked.

Indirect speech:

He sat down on the sofa carelessly and asked himself why they were asking him to contribute to the project.

Free indirect speech:

He sat down on the sofa carelessly. Why were they asking him to contribute to the project?

Famous writers who use free indirect speech

1. Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language

2. From Randell Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction, p.32. cited in this wekipedia entry)

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Free indirect speech is also called free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or discours indirect libre in French. While indirect speech conveys the reported statement in the words of the reporter, with verbs generally 'backshifted' as far as the tense is concerned and changes in pronouns and adverbials of time and place are made to align with the time of reporting; free direct speech lacks a reporting clause to show the shift from narration to reporting.

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William Blake, 1794

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The Civil War profoundly shaped the United States as we know it today. Nevertheless, the war remains one of the most misunderstood events in American history. Here are ten basic facts you need to know about America's defining struggle.
Fact #1: The Civil War was fought between the Northern and the Southern states from 1861-1865.

The American Civil War was fought between the United States of America and the Confederate States of America, a collection of eleven southern states that left the Union in 1860 and 1861. The conflict began primarily as a result of the long-standing disagreement over the institution of slavery. On February 9, 1861, Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. Senator and Secretary of War, was elected President of the Confederate States of America by the members of the Confederate constitutional convention. After four bloody years of conflict, the United States defeated the Confederate States. In the end, the states that were in rebellion were readmitted to the United States, and the institution of slavery was abolished nation-wide.

Fact #2: Abraham Lincoln was the President of the United States during the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin in Kentucky. He worked as a shopkeeper and a lawyer before entering politics in the 1840s. Alarmed by his anti-slavery stance, seven southern states seceded soon after he was elected president in 1860-with four more states to soon follow. Lincoln declared that he would do everything necessary to keep the United States united as one country. He refused to recognize the southern states as an independent nation and the Civil War erupted in the spring of 1861. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the areas of the country that "shall then be in rebellion against the United States." The Emancipation Proclamation laid the groundwork for the eventual freedom of slaves across the country. Lincoln won re-election in 1864 against opponents who wanted to sign a peace treaty with the southern states. On April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot by assassin John Wilkes Booth, a southern sympathizer. Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 am the next morning.

Fact #3: The issues of slavery and central power divided the United States.

Slavery was concentrated mainly in the southern states by the mid-19th century, where slaves were used as farm laborers, artisans, and house servants. Chattel slavery formed the backbone of the largely agrarian southern economy. In the northern states, industry largely drove the economy. Many people in the north and the south believed that slavery was immoral and wrong, yet the institution remained, which created a large chasm on the political and social landscape. Southerners felt threatened by the pressure of northern politicians and "abolitionists," who included the zealot John Brown, and claimed that the federal government had no power to end slavery, impose certain taxes, force infrastructure improvements, or influence western expansion against the wishes of the state governments. While some northerners felt that southern politicians wielded too much power in the House and the Senate and that they would never be appeased. Still, from the earliest days of the United States through the antebellum years, politicians on both sides of the major issues attempted to find a compromise that would avoid the splitting of the country, and ultimately avert a war. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and many others, all failed to steer the country away from secession and war. In the end, politicians on both sides of the aisle dug in their heels. Eleven states left the United States in the following order and formed the Confederate States of America: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

Fact #4: The Civil War began when Southern troops bombarded Fort Sumter, South Carolina.

When the southern states seceded from the Union, war was still not a certainty. Federal forts, barracks, and naval shipyards dotted the southern landscape. Many Regular Army officers clung tenaciously to their posts, rather than surrender their facilities to the growing southern military presence. President Lincoln attempted to resupply these garrisons with food and provisions by sea. The Confederacy learned of Lincoln's plans and demanded that the forts surrender under threat of force. When the U.S. soldiers refused, South Carolinians bombarded Fort Sumter in the center of Charleston harbor. After a 34-hour battle, the soldiers inside the fort surrendered to the Confederates. Legions of men from north and south rushed to their respective flags in the ensuing patriotic fervor.

Fact #5: The North had more men and war materials than the South.

At the beginning of the Civil War, 22 million people lived in the North and 9 million people (nearly 4 million of whom were slaves) lived in the South. The North also had more money, more factories, more horses, more railroads, and more farmland. On paper, these advantages made the United States much more powerful than the Confederate States. However, the Confederates were fighting defensively on territory that they knew well. They also had the advantage of the sheer size of the Southern Confederacy. Which meant that the northern armies would have to capture and hold vast quantities of land across the south. Still, too, the Confederacy maintained some of the best ports in North America-including New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Norfolk, and Wilmington. Thus, the Confederacy was able to mount a stubborn resistance.

Fact #6: The bloodiest battle of the Civil War was the Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The Civil War devastated the Confederate states. The presence of vast armies throughout the countryside meant that livestock, crops, and other staples were consumed very quickly. In an effort to gather fresh supplies and relieve the pressure on the Confederate garrison at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Confederate General Robert E. Lee launched a daring invasion of the North in the summer of 1863. He was defeated by Union General George G. Meade in a three-day battle near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania that left nearly 51,000 men killed, wounded, or missing in action. While Lee's men were able to gather the vital supplies, they did little to draw Union forces away from Vicksburg, which fell to Federal troops on July 4, 1863. Many historians mark the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Mississippi, as the "turning point" in the Civil War. In November of 1863, President Lincoln traveled to the small Pennsylvania town and delivered the Gettysburg Address, which expressed firm commitment to preserving the Union and became one of the most iconic speeches in American history.

Fact #7: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee did not meet on the field of battle until May of 1864.

Arguably the two most famous military personalities to emerge from the American Civil War were Ohio born Ulysses S. Grant, and Virginia born Robert E. Lee. The two men had very little in common. Lee was from a well respected First Family of Virginia, with ties to the Continental Army and the founding fathers of the nation. While Grant was from a middle-class family with no martial or family political ties. Both men graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the old army as well as the Mexican-American War. Lee was offered command of the federal army amassing in Washington, in 1861, but he declined the command and threw his hat in with the Confederacy. Lee's early war career got off to a rocky start, but he found his stride in June of 1862 after he assumed command of what he dubbed the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant, on the other hand, found early success in the war but was haunted by rumors of alcoholism. By 1863, the two men were by far the best generals on their respective sides. In March of 1864, Grant was promoted to lieutenant general and brought to the Eastern Theater of the war, where he and Lee engaged in a relentless campaign from May of 1864 to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House eleven months later.

Fact #8: The North won the Civil War.

After four years of conflict, the major Confederate armies surrendered to the United States in April of 1865 at Appomattox Court House and Bennett Place. The war bankrupted much of the South, left its roads, farms, and factories in ruins, and all but wiped out an entire generation of men who wore the blue and the gray. More than 620,000 men died in the Civil War, more than any other war in American history. The southern states were occupied by Union soldiers, rebuilt, and gradually re-admitted to the United States over the course of twenty difficult years known as the Reconstruction Era.

Fact #9: After the war was over, the Constitution was amended to free the slaves, to assure "equal protection under the law" for American citizens, and to grant black men the right to vote.

During the war, Abraham Lincoln freed some slaves and allowed freedmen to join the Union Army as the United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.). It was clear to many that it was only a matter of time before slavery would be fully abolished. As the war drew to a close, but before the southern states were re-admitted to the United States, the northern states added the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. The amendments are also known as the "Civil War Amendments." The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, the 14th Amendment guaranteed that citizens would receive "equal protection under the law," and the 15th Amendment granted black men the right to vote. The 14th Amendment has played an ongoing role in American society as different groups of citizens continue to lobby for equal treatment by the government.

Fact #10: Many Civil War battlefields are threatened by development.

The United States government has identified 384 battles that had a significant impact on the larger war. Many of these battlefields have been developed-turned into shopping malls, pizza parlors, housing developments, etc.-and many more are threatened by development. Since the end of the Civil War, veterans and other citizens have struggled to preserve the fields on which Americans fought and died. The American Battlefield Trust and its partners have preserved tens of thousands of acres of battlefield land.

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10 Facts: What Everyone Should Know About the Civil War

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The Civil War profoundly shaped the United States as we know it today. Nevertheless, the war remains one of the most misunderstood events in American history. Here are ten basic facts you need to know about America's defining struggle.

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OLIVER! (1968) You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two

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Maya Angelou - Civil Rights Activist & Author | Mini Bio | BIO

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Introduction to the "Coming of Age" story

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Characteristics of Coming of Age Stories

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Dead Poets Society (1989) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

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Collins Thesaurus | Synonyms, Antonyms and Definitions

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Online English Thesaurus from Collins: More than 500,000 synonyms and antonyms - With definitions, meanings, phrases, and examples.

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“Good” is dull and unimaginative. People often use “good” as a lazy replacement for a more appropriate word. Custom Writing have created an excellent

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Ministère de l'Education Nationale et de la Jeunesse

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Cette note de service définit l'épreuve terminale de l'enseignement de spécialité langues, littératures et cultures étrangères et régionales (LLCER) de la classe de terminale. Elle est applicable à compter de la session 2021 du baccalauréat. Elle s'applique à tous les enseignements proposés en langues, littératures et cultures étrangères et régionales, y compris l'enseignement de spécialité " anglais monde contemporain ", mis en place à compter de la rentrée scolaire 2020/2021.

Objectifs de l'évaluation

L'épreuve porte sur le programme de la classe de terminale défini par l'arrêté du 19 juillet 2019 paru au BOEN spécial n° 8 du 25 juillet 2019 et, pour la LLCER (autre qu'anglais, monde contemporain), sur le programme d'œuvres, renouvelé par moitié tous les deux ans. Elle prend également appui sur les acquis du programme de la classe de première. Les notions et thématiques rencontrées en classe de première (cf. arrêté du 17 janvier 2019 paru au BOEN spécial n° 1 du 22 janvier 2019) mais non approfondies en classe de terminale, doivent être connues et mobilisables. Elles ne peuvent cependant pas constituer un ressort essentiel du sujet.

L'épreuve se compose d'une partie écrite et d'une partie orale, chacune comptant pour moitié de la note finale.

Pour les enseignements de LLCER hors anglais monde contemporain, seul l'oral évalue les œuvres figurant au programme limitatif. À l'écrit, pour toutes les LLCER, les candidats ont le choix entre deux sujets qui prennent appui sur deux des trois thématiques du programme de terminale.

Partie écrite

Durée : 3 heures 30

Objectifs

L'épreuve vise à évaluer la maîtrise par le candidat des attendus du programme de l'enseignement de spécialité langues, littératures et cultures étrangères et régionales pour la classe de terminale.

Structure

L'épreuve comporte deux parties :

1re partie : synthèse en langue étrangère

- Élaboration d'une synthèse d'un dossier documentaire, guidée par deux ou trois questions ou consignes, en environ 500 mots. Le dossier documentaire est composé de trois ou quatre documents, adossés à l'une des thématiques au programme de l'enseignement de spécialité de terminale. La longueur cumulée des textes est comprise entre 4000 et 5000 signes, blancs et espaces compris ;

Le dossier documentaire est composé de documents de natures diverses, tels que :

- un document iconographique (image, graphique, tableau, etc.) ;

- un texte littéraire (obligatoirement pour la spécialité LLCER autre qu'anglais, monde contemporain) ;

- un texte de presse (obligatoirement pour la spécialité LLCER anglais, monde contemporain) ;

- un extrait d'essai, etc.

La synthèse peut être complétée par un écrit complémentaire de type argumentatif, l'ensemble n'excédant pas 500 mots.

2e partie : traduction ou transposition en français

Selon les langues, le sujet précise s'il s'agit :

- d'une traduction en français d'un passage d'un des textes du dossier d'environ 500 signes, blancs et espaces compris ;

ou

- d'une transposition en français, rendant compte des idées principales d'un des textes présents dans le dossier.

Matériel autorisé

L'usage du dictionnaire unilingue non encyclopédique est autorisé.

Niveau attendu

B2/C1 (C1 pour anglais, monde contemporain)

Notation

L'épreuve est notée sur 20 points (synthèse : 16 points ; traduction : 4 points).

La grille d'évaluation présente en annexe est fournie aux correcteurs.

Partie orale

Durée : 20 minutes (sans préparation)

Objectifs

L'épreuve vise à évaluer la maîtrise par le candidat des attendus du programme de l'enseignement de spécialité langues, littératures et cultures étrangères et régionales pour le cycle terminal.

Structure

L'épreuve consiste en un oral de 20 minutes qui s'appuie sur un dossier personnel présenté par le candidat et visé par son professeur de l'année de terminale.

Le candidat remet un exemplaire de son dossier à l'examinateur au début de sa prise de parole et en conserve un qu'il utilise selon ses besoins durant l'épreuve.

Le dossier est composé de quatre à six documents textuels et /ou iconographiques (étudiés ou non en classe) en lien avec une ou plusieurs thématiques du programme du cycle terminal. Il comprend :

Pour la spécialité LLCER autre qu'anglais, monde contemporain :

- au moins une des œuvres intégrales étudiées au cours du cycle terminal (œuvre matérialisée par un extrait ou une illustration) ;

- au moins deux textes littéraires, sans se limiter au genre romanesque ; le candidat peut prendre appui sur les annexes publiées avec les programmes du cycle terminal, mais peut, s'il le juge pertinent, enrichir son dossier de textes littéraires de son choix ;

- au plus deux œuvres d'art visuel (affiche, caricature, dessin, extrait de film, peinture, sculpture, etc.) ;

- au moins un texte non littéraire (article de presse, extrait de discours, d'essai, etc.).

Pour la spécialité LLCER anglais, monde contemporain :

- au moins un article de presse ;

- au plus deux textes d'une autre nature ;

- au plus deux documents iconographiques.

Sans temps de préparation, le candidat présente son dossier dans la langue cible pendant 10 minutes au plus pour en justifier les choix et en exprimer la logique interne, puis interagit avec l'examinateur dans la langue cible pendant 10 minutes au plus.

Si le candidat ne présente pas de dossier, l'examinateur lui remet trois documents de natures différentes en lien avec une des thématiques du programme du cycle terminal. Le candidat commente ces documents.

Les candidats individuels sont soumis aux mêmes conditions et doivent présenter un dossier de même format.

Niveau attendu

B2/C1 (C1 pour anglais, monde contemporain)

Notation

L'épreuve est notée sur 20 points.

La grille d'évaluation présente en annexe est fournie aux correcteurs.

Le dossier, présenté ou non par le candidat, n'est pas évalué.

Candidats en situation de handicap

Les dispenses et aménagements de l'épreuve sont faits conformément à l'arrêté du 22 juillet 2019 relatif aux dispenses et aménagements d'épreuves de langue vivante pour les candidats au baccalauréat général et technologique présentant tout trouble relevant du handicap, publié au JO n° 0198 du 27 août 2019.

Épreuve orale de contrôle

Durée : 20 minutes.

Temps de préparation : 20 minutes.

L'évaluation prend appui sur un document découvert par le candidat au moment de l'épreuve. Ce document se rapporte à l'une des thématiques du programme et peut relever de genres très différents (image publicitaire, dessin humoristique, photographie, reproduction d'une œuvre plastique, slogan, titre d'article de presse, question invitant le candidat à prendre position sur un sujet d'actualité ou un phénomène de société, etc.).

L'examinateur propose au candidat deux documents. Chaque document est en lien avec une des thématiques du cycle terminal. Le candidat choisit l'un de ces documents et dispose ensuite de 20 minutes pour organiser ses idées et préparer son propos. Le document, qui ne donne pas lieu à un commentaire formel, doit permettre au candidat de prendre la parole librement. Cette prise de parole en continu, qui n'excède pas 10 minutes, sert d'amorce à une conversation conduite par l'examinateur, qui prend notamment appui sur l'exposé du candidat. Cette phase d'interaction n'excède pas 10 minutes.

Pour chaque candidat, l'examinateur conduit son évaluation à partir de la fiche d'évaluation et de notation publiée en annexe.

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Cette note de service définit l'épreuve terminale de l'enseignement de spécialité langues, littératures et cultures étrangères et régionales (LLCER) de la classe de terminale. Elle est applicable à compter de la session 2021 du baccalauréat.

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This Is What The Life Of An Incel Looks Like (HBO)

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Pronunciation dictionary

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Free Online English Pronunciation Dictionary | Howjsay | Learn to Pronounce English Words | Howjsay

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Learn How to Pronounce English Words | Natural Recordings by Native Speakers

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Collocations in English - Learn English Vocabulary

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Teachers | ENGLISH FOR SPEAKERS OF OTHER LANGUAGES

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Welcome to the new Excellence Gateway English for speakers of other languages exhibition site. This site brings together some of the most effective resources for ESOL available, including resources and activities from the British Council’s ESOL Nexus site, material created by the Education and Train…

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The 1960s, The Decade that Shook Britain

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If the Fifties were in black and white, then the Sixties were in Technicolor. For many, the 'Swinging Sixties' remain...

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David Bowie alter ego: How many alter egos did David Bowie have? Who were they?

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David Bowie's music was innovative in a great many ways; from production to stage presence. He also had iconic fashion looks including androgynous outfits and characters. Those characters were many and varied - but who were they?

Ziggy Stardust

Ziggy Stardust is the first character who David Bowie became famous for, who came with his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

In an interview with Alan Yentob in 1996, made in time for his 50th birthday, David admitted he was inspired by the 'C-list rock star' Vince Taylor who he met at a few parties, though Vince was not in the music industry in the same way as David.

He told Alan: "I met him a few times in the mid-Sixties, and I went to a few parties with him. He was out of his gourd.

"Totally flipped. The guy was not playing with a full deck at all.

"He used to carry maps of Europe around with him, and I remember him opening a map outside Charing Cross tube station, putting it on the pavement and kneeling down with a magnifying glass.
READ MORE: John Lennon children: Do Julian and Sean Lennon get on?
"He pointed out all the sites where UFOs were going to land.

"He came out on stage in white robes and said he was Jesus Christ.

"It was the end of Vince - his career and everything else."

Ziggy was a fictional, androgynous rockstar sent to Earth to save the world from the apocalypse.

Throughout the album, as shown in various songs, Ziggy seduces everyone he meets until he dies at the end of the album, a victim of his fame which has overrun him and led him to become arrogant.

Aladdin Sane

David killed off Ziggy Stardust at a concert in London, after which he introduced his new persona, Aladdin Sane, though technically the album to accompany his new persona had already been released.

Aladdin Sane is often considered a more sinister character than his first and is influenced by his time touring as Ziggy Stardust in America.

Speaking to Rolling Stone about Aladdin, he said: "There was a point in 1973 where I knew it was all over.

"I didn't want to be trapped in this Ziggy character all my life. And I guess what I was doing on Aladdin Sane, I was trying to move into the next area - but using a rather pale imitation of Ziggy as a secondary device.

"In my mind, it was Ziggy Goes to Washington: Ziggy under the influence of America."

Some have also suggested Aladdin Sane was inspired by David's half-brother, Terry, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Given David has identified how Aladdin Sane is the alter ego to Ziggy, a far darker and more sinister one at that, this could be an example of their split personality.

The Thin White Duke

The Thin White Duke is usually linked to David' Station to Statio album, released in 1976.

However, he began using the character slightly earlier, even during his Young Americans tour, and it is believed the look of the character was based on Thomas Jerome Newton, the humanoid alien he played in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

The Thin White Duke wears a baggy white shirt with black trousers and waistcoat and has platinum blonde hair, but is mainly known for his controversy.

During the time of the Thin White Duke, David said some shocking things, with some thinking he had turned into a neo-Nazi or fascist.

Speaking to the Daily Express in 1976, he claimed these comments were an extension of the character and not his views in any way.

He said: "I'm Pierrot. I'm Everyman. What I'm doing is theatre and only theatre...

"What you see on stage isn't sinister. It's pure clown. I'm using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it.

"The white face, the baggy pants - they're Pierrot, the eternal clown putting over the great sadness."

Later on in his career, however, David admitted some of these comments came from his use of hard drugs and his cocaine addiction, which was worsening in the period leading up to his living in Berlin.

He said of this time: "It was a dangerous period for me. I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity."

The Blind Prophet

On David's final album, Blackstar, he portrays a man covered in bandages, who is foretelling his own demise.

Of course, the album was released only days before his death, with some suggesting the name for the album actually related to cancer, of which he died.

Other than his musical characters, David has played various extraordinary characters in TV and film, such as the Goblin King in Labyrinth.

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David Bowie alter ego: How many alter egos did David Bowie have? Who were they?

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David Bowie's music was innovative in a great many ways; from production to stage presence. He also had iconic fashion looks including androgynous outfits and characters. Those characters were many and varied - but who were they?

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'Eng-er-land swings like a pendulum do,' sang Roger Miller.

This use of the word 'swinging', like a pendulum, is symbolic of movement or change, and there was certainly a great deal of change going on in many aspects of British life during the sixties:

Fashion

Fashion in the sixties could almost have been described as explosive. So many new hip styles were being introduced all over England, particularly in London. This was now the trendy, swinging place to be, the 'Scene' as it was called by Time magazine. There was new confidence and boldness breaking out everywhere, and so many different fashions were going through circulation that the period was described by Harper's Bazaar as 'enjoy-it-today-sling-it-tomorrow' fashion. New materials were used, reflecting the excitement and technology of the space age, like Melinex, Lurex and PVC, but perhaps the biggest change in fashion is that it ceased to be an exclusively female concern. Men became interested in fashion and 'became peacocks', many of them relishing the change to the colourful, flowery looks that became so popular.

Very few fashions are actually new, many are just old ones coming back into style, for example, women's fashion at this time echoed the sensual 1920s, a slinky boyish look with heavily made up eyes, pale lips and sleek hair in the new geometric styles championed by Vidal Sassoon.

Music

During the sixties, there was a tidal wave of bands and artists, with hundreds of new acts popping up all over the music scene. One of the most popular were the Beatles, who's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1st,1967, ushering in a new 'psychedelic' form of pop music and fashion combined. This is sometimes known as the hippy movement. Sgt Pepper was spiced with unusual instruments, tunes played backwards, bizarre lyrics based on Victorian circus posters, and coded references to hallucinogenic drugs. In fact by the end of the sixties many artists were constantly on drugs to find inspiration for new things, and the lyrics to many songs that were written 'under the influence' seemed very odd in a normal state of mind, but people went with it. The national anthem of the hippy tribe was: 'you don't have to try and explain it, you just had to feel it.'

London/Liverpool

London has already been described as the 'Scene' during the 1960s, but not all the innovation came out of London. Northern cities built up their own scene based on pop. The music capital of Britain was Liverpool, not just for The Beatles, but also for Cilla Black, The Searchers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J.Kramer, the Swinging blue Jeans and more than 300 other bands.

Entertainment and TV

Television was fast evolving during the 1960s. In the early stages television was little more than a surge of advertising, everything from detergent to cigarettes to Kit-Kats. This was the Britain of the 2-minute commercial break, and it was a reassuring place to live, with lots of nice, normal people advertising nice, normal things. As the decade unfolded, television advertising took an ever stronger hold upon the national consciousness. Jingles were sung in school playgrounds, and the catchphrases used in advertising were almost more popular than the products they promoted.

Satire

One of the most famous satirical programmes aired during the sixties was That Was The Week That Was (TW3 for short). Beginning in 1962, the young and ruthlessly funny TW3 team heaped scorn on the government and all of its works, using the semi-official BBC to do it. There were many complaints about shows of this type. Mrs Whitehouse of the National Viewers' and Listeners Association described TW3 as 'Anti-authority, anti-religious, anti-patriotism, pro-dirt.' These however were the things that people liked about the programme.

Not only in television were people mocking the government, but they were doing it in magazines as well. A classic example of this is OZ magazine, which was described by the News of the World as 'Obscene and dirty.' OZ came to London in 1966, with publishers Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson pushing the limits of permissiveness with every edition. But prosecution for obscenity followed the 1970 'school kids' issue' which included, among other outrages, and obscene cartoon of Rupert the Bear.

Politics

The government changed hands a few times during the sixties. From 1957 to 1963 Harold MacMillan of the Conservative party was Prime Minister, but he had a health scare and thought he was going to die, so he resigned in 1963 and Lord Home became Prime Minister, but before he could do so he had to change his title to Sir Alex Douglas Home as Lords could not get involved in politics. Both of these men were from the Conservative party, and both went to Etan and Oxford.

In 1964 Sir Alex Douglas Home lost the election to Harold Wilson of the Labour party who was Prime Minister until 1970. Surprisingly Harold Wilson also went to Oxford, but before that to Grammar School.

Sport

The sixties were a memorable sporting period for many people. In the 1960 Olympics in Rome, the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City British athletes did outstandingly well to win the multitude of medals that they received.

The sixties also happened to be the golden age of Formula One, producing four British world champions: Jim Clarke (1963, 1965), Graham Hill (1962, 1968), John Surtees (1964) and Jackie Stewart (1969).
Tennis was widely appreciated as well, especially in 1961, when the women's final at Wimbledon was an all-British affair, with Angela Mortimer beating Christine Truman 4-6, 6-4, 7-5 in a close and exciting match.

Also in heavyweight boxing in 1963 Henry Cooper became one of the very few men to put Cassius Clay on the deck, despite Clay having the overall victory after the referee called a halt in the fifth round.
Despite all of these great sporting moments many of them didn't come close to being as widely remembered as England's victory in the World Cup final against Germany.

Social Behaviour and Habits - 'Permissive Society

During the sixties there was a change to many people's attitude to sex. Two events, one legal and one medical, heralded the sexual revolution.

The legal turning point was the prosecution trial of Penguin Books because of it publishing D.H. Lawrence's novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', the story of an upper class woman and her affair with her gamekeeper. The book was considered to have broken a number of social and sexual taboos. It was an absurd trial, and the jury found Penguin not guilty, and the whole ordeal made censorship seem out of place in a free society.

The medical turning point was the introduction of the Pill into British society. For the first time in history women had a foolproof defence against unwanted pregnancy, and it gave people the chance to have spontaneous, carefree and relaxed sexual relations with each other.

Other things became more acceptable, drugs for example, which were freely taken by hippies and people who wanted to expand their minds and to have a good 'swinging' time.

Economic Change

For almost the first time in the century there was not the threat of, or recovery from, war for people to worry about. Another thing that was a change was that they had money to spend on things that they wanted, rather that just on what they needed. This increase in personal wealth gave people more money in their pockets, which obviously needed something to be spent on. Soon the market became flooded with products to suit peoples needs, and this provided people with jobs which meant that they were earning money that they could spend on other things, and so the economy was in an upward spiral for much of the sixties.

Immigration

In the course of the decade the number of immigrants from the Commonwealth more than doubled. Most of these were West Indians; the others were mostly Asians with roots in the Indian subcontinent or in East Africa.

Unlike the West Indians, Asians made virtually no impact on pop music or football, but contributed to the life of the nation in many ways. On of the most common contributions that they made, which is still going strong even today, was the enlivening of the national cuisine, making the curry house a tradition to rival the chip shop; with their tireless industry and talent for commerce they rescued the dying institution of the corner shop.

There were of course many people who disagreed with immigration. One of the most famous cases of this was when Enoch Powell, a Conservative MP, spoke out against immigration and was branded as a racist and an 'evil' person. He was sacked soon after the incident in 1969.

From this point on Britain was a multicultural society, and it has remained so to this day.

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h2g2 - The Swinging Sixties - An Overview

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'Eng-er-land swings like a pendulum do,' sang Roger Miller. This use of the word 'swinging', like a pendulum, is symbolic of movement or change, and there was certainly a great deal of change going on in many aspects of British life during the sixties: Fashion in the sixties could almost have been described as explosive.

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Women's 1960s fashion was an extreme style and attitude from the start of the decade to the end. In the early years, the fashion idol was Jackie Kennedy with her perfect white pearls and tailored suit dresses. By the middle of the decade, supermodel Twiggy had women freeing their minds and bodies into clothing that didn't require any extra thought or effort.

From modest to "there is no such thing as too short," 1960s fashion was in many ways like the 1920s flapper revolution. But it didn't happen overnight.

Skip the history and shop 1960s style clothing:

Women's 1960s Fashion Trends

What clothes were popular in the 1960s? Shift dresses, mini skirts, go go boots, flare pants, jumper dresses, colorful denim, cloche hats, turtleneck shirts, flat shoes, pattern tights, and daisy flower prints. Many of these 60s clothes are back in style now.
Even more 1960s fashion trends were:

Jackie Kennedy, Brigitte Bardot, and Mary Quant were fashion icons.

The Youthquake movement created "Babydoll" clothing.

Short, shapeless shift dresses in bright colors and colorblock patterns became a staple of the Mod look.

Button-down shirts, turtlenecks, and chunky knit sweaters made up casual outfits.

Mini skirts or pencil skirts in plaid were a teenage girl's school outfit.

Jax pants, stirrup pants, bell bottoms, and pantsuits were new trends.

Low heel flats, step in boots, and vinyl shoes made up 60s footwear.

Stockings or tall socks came in all colors.

Pop Art jewelry was collectable.

60s hairstyles could be short and bobbed or long and straight.

Hippie fashion - Blue jeans, ethnic clothing, psychedelic swirls, tie-dye in the mid-late 1960s.

1960s Fashion Icons

Jackie Kennedy's style was clean, simple, and well fitted, with perfectly matched accessories. Janie wore dresses without collars and jackets that buttoned only with one large top button.

On her feet she wore sensible low heeled shoes (although many women still preferred high heels). She was the last celebrity woman to wear hats, a pillbox hat, as a necessary fashion.

Jackie O' put a lot of care into her look, and women both in the USA and abroad copied her style with enthusiasm.

Sadly, after her husband's assassination, Jackie was no longer in the public eye. Women had to find a new 1960s fashion idol to be inspired by.

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Brigitte Bardot was that woman. She was Jackie's opposite. Jackie was put together, simple and modest. Brigitte was tacky, cheap, bold, and even silly. Her 1959 pink gingham wedding dress with white lace trim was so unexpected that gingham and lace quickly became a new trend in the early 60s.

Mary Quant was another 1960s fashion influence. Her style moved away from "grown-up fashion" to playful "youth" driven clothing. Her shift dresses were short, very short, and her prints were bold and colorful "mod" prints. Her fashion as well as her personality set the tone for the rest of the 1960s: "fashion is fun."

It was the whole idea of a return to childhood that drove most of the fashion in the 1960s. Oversized collars, bows, and delicate trim miniaturized women and made them appear smaller.

Shapeless 60s mini dresses de-emphasized a woman's natural form. The flat and boxy look took away women's curves and made them little girls once more.

Kitten heel pumps, Mary Jane strap shoes, and flat sneakers were all childhood shoes returned to the '60s youthquake culture.

It was no coincidence that a young culture had a lot to do with half the American population being under 25 and with European countries having a similarly large youth population, too.

After growing up in the '50s as "little adults," the youth embraced their fond early childhood memories and fashions. By children's fashion, we mean babies and toddlers. The 1960s "babydoll" look was incorporated into dress, hair, and even makeup.

1960s Dresses

The full skirt and tight bodice of the '50s swing dress continued in the early '60s, with a slightly above- or at-the-knee hemline and modest high necklines.

1960s dress colors and patterns were bigger, brighter, and streamlined with simple necklines and short cap sleeves. This full-skirted look didn't leave fashion in the 1960s. Instead, it carried through to the 1970s in a pared down, less fluffy form.

The other style of early 60s dresses was the contoured sheath dress. Like the 50s version, it was knee-length, modest, and simple, but tailored to the hourglass curve of the body. By 1963, the sheath was losing its tight curves (a welcome relief) and relaxing into the shift dress.

The shift dress lacked any sort of tailored waistline, but did pinch in slightly around the ribs and skimmed over the hips to just above the knee. This loose but narrow looking dress was very comfortable and easy to wear. It became the primary women's dress style of the 1960s.

1960s skimmer dresses were a cousin of the shift dress. Skimmers fit straight on the body with a high neckline and (usually) a belt to define the waist, but not shape it. They "skimmed" the body without touching the skin. The hemline also hovered above the knee- how daring!

The 1960s drop waist dress was a 1920s throwback where the skirt circled the low hip and dropped to the knee. It was a bit more fitted than the shift dress, with a gathered or pleated skirt. The drop waist dress seemed to have been favored by mature women who were more used to a tailored fit.

1960s dresses became shorter and shorter. Anything above the knee was a "mini skirt." How short a woman's dress became a sign of how confident she was - not necessarily that she had great legs.

Hem length was directly proportional to how 60s women felt about their own sexual liberation.

1960s short skirts were not meant to attract men for the sake of sexual interest, but instead were a way to attract attention so that a WOMAN could be the one to decide if his attention was wanted. It was sexual power through fashion.

The jumper dress was a Mary Quant invention that captured the youthful, playful side of 1960s fashion. That style immediately made a 20-year-old look 10, a welcome change from the '50s mature fashion. Big bows, large round collars, pastels, and polka dots were all dress details that made women look like a little girl's dolls. The more innocent, the better.

Colors and prints were at first inspired by the pop art and modern art movements, AKA "Mod" culture.

Checkerboard, horizontal stripes, windowpane, polka dots, colorblock, honeycomb, houndstooth and Campbell's soup cans were all placed on short shift dresses with contrasting white cuffs and collars. Black and white was especially MOD.

Psychedelic swirls and prints introduced a trippy edge to clothing that was picked up by the hippies around 1966-1968. Being over the top was never too much. Large paisley swirls, neon flower daisies, and tropical beach prints all made an appearance. Bright yellow, orange, hot pink, and lime green were the favorites. These bold colors and loud patterns were seen on dresses, skirts, tops, and pants.
Shop 1960s style dresses here
There was also a trend of earth tone colors, especially as the 60s decade moved toward the hippie movement. Moss green, earthy browns, mustard yellow, and burnt orange were common colors year-round.

See more examples of vintage 1960s dresses here.

Hippie outfits are popular 60s party costumes. Learn more about who the real 1960s hippies were and what they wore. Shop more 70s style hippie dresses too.

1960s Cocktail, Prom, and Evening Dresses

For swanky 19 60s cocktail parties, the party look of the '60s was the same short shift, tent, and skimmer dress styles in luxury fabrics, mostly in black ... or white.

The two-piece jacket dress was a classic with mature ladies.

For the young, dressy shell tops and cigarette pants were a welcome change from dresses.

In the late '60s, wide-leg jumpsuits became a type of hostess dress, acceptable for evening house parties.

In the 1960s, pastels were worn in the summer and rich jewel tones in fall. Lace was a popular 1960s fabric as well as velvet or a classic light crepe. Most cocktail dresses were undecorated, but some had braid and metallic mesh trim around the necks and hems. "Minimal" was the sixties look to achieve.

For 1960s evenings and prom, the choice was between short or long empire waist dresses.

Usually sleeveless, the longer dresses were shaped like a column with pleats at the back. The top was often a contrasting lace or damask material cinched in with a bow on the front or back.

Short 60s evening dresses looked the same as long dresses, just shorter. Many were tent shaped or A-line instead of the slim column shape.

Learn more about 1960s cocktail party/evening wear/wedding party attire here.

1960s Tops, Sweaters, Coats

1960s women's tops, shirts, blouses, and sweaters all took direction from casual clothing in the 1950s. The primary change was that shirts and sweaters now fit straight on the body, with no emphasis on the bust or waist.

1960s tops could also be worn untucked. Gasp!

Women's 60s tops hung out over pants and skirts and grew longer as the decade advanced. Necklines also grew higher, back to the modest look of the 1930s.

The mock neck blouse or knit shirt was a classic. Sleeveless in summer and typically called shells, the fit was always boxy. They were casual solid tops worn with pants and shorts. Long sleeve black turtlenecks were a uniform of the Beatniks in London, but in the USA horizontal stripes were worn by every young person.

Big roll collars, round Peter Pan collars (often in contrasting white), big bows, and pointed shirt collars called attention to a thin neck and short hair.

Women's 1960s button up shirts took on the look of menswear with round or straight hems, oversized collars, and bold prints.

Bright colors and big prints made colorful statements when paired with a solid color matching pant. Learn more about 1960s blouses, tops, and shirt styles for women.
Shop 1960s tops and shirts here.
1960s knitted sweaters were usually solid colored pullovers or in the boxy cardigan style.

'60s knitwear designs favored texture - thick textured cable knits and wide rib knits were very popular. Many had large fold-out collars and oversized roll necks. Cardigans were usually collarless with some unique print in the early to mid-'60s such as small argyle, checks, chevron, or florals.

Read more about 1960s knitwear and sweaters
Shop 1960s sweaters and cardigans.
For winter wear, a good wool coat was still necessary. 1960s women's coats narrowed down and shortened up to fit over new, thinner, clothes.

Round collars with big buttons, flap pockets, geometric prints, and maybe a belt kept 60s coats looking cute and fun. Outerwear came down to just above the knee so that long, lean legs would continue to be the focal point.

Women's 1960s legs froze in winter. Only a warm pair of stockings, tights or tall socks could save them.

Short jackets in the 60s, especially those made of suede and leather, were popular options for the young and casual girl.

Shiny plastic-like vinyl was even more trendy with the space-age loving mod set.
Shop 1960s coats and jackets.
Most 60s women, however, chose a blazer-type jacket that was dressy enough to be worn with dresses, but also casual enough to be worn with pants on the weekends.

1960s Skirts

Women's 1960s skirts came in knee lengths with classic circle skirts/swing skirts, straight pencil skirts, and box-pleated A-line skirts (school girl style) in the early to mid 60s. Plaid patterns were very popular in the fall and winter, and solid pastels in spring and summer.

The late '60s saw the first shocker - the mini skirt - enter fashion. Mini skirts were 4-6 inches above the knee in box pleats or A-line button front shapes.

Plaids, pleats, corduroy, and heavy knits were perfect for 60s mini skirts. They were worn with tights and tall go go boots by teens and trendy college-age girls.

Mature women didn't wear minis. They went the opposite direction - longer! Button front knee-length skirts, knee-length skorts, and at-the-knee denim skirts were all newer options for 1960s women.

The maxi skirt came about at the end of the 60s decade too. Women and girls of all ages loved them.

Long skirts were gathered at the waist, sometimes with a tie bow, and hung down in a column shape. They took inspiration from prairie dresses and were made in hippie loving calico prints or swirly psychedelic eye poppers. In the evenings, long skirts were quilted or made with shiny taffeta fabrics.
Shop mini skirts, A-line skirts, long maxi skirts, denim skirts, and more.
The 1960s style skirt has returned to fashion this year.

1960s Pants

1960s Jax pants with a very high waist, shaped hip, and slender leg continued to be favorites from the 1950s. Women's 60s pants were usually lined, with side zippers and no waistband.

Women's 1960s pants could be worn with blouses tucked in, but more often had longer tops untucked.

Crop tops were a favorite in 60s summer - never too short, but occasionally long enough to overlap the pants' waistband.

The 1960s stretch pant and stirrup pant took advantage of a new kind of knit fabric.

Easy to sew and wear, the elastic stirrup under the foot kept pants smooth and straight. It didn't matter that the stirrup was visible. When ankle boots came into fashion, suddenly visible stirrups were taboo. Boots must be worn!

All 1960s pants / trousers came down to just above the ankle until the late '60s, when longer pants became the new trend. They also still zipped up the back or side for most of the decade, but moved to the front for trousers and jean styles.

Pants in the 60s were high waisted (circling the belly button) except for the youthful hip hugger styles that appeared in the mid '60s. They were more popular in Europe than America, and very trendy with the Mods and Beatniks.

1960s denim jeans followed the fit and style of slim pants: high waist, tapered leg, ankle crop, and in many more colors than just blue. White was especially trendy. Blue jeans were not as common as you might expect. They somewhat disappeared in the 1960s, only to return with a vengeance in 1969 with a flared boot cut.
Shop 1960s style pants here.
Flare jeans and pants may have started in the 1960s, but didn't go mainstream until 1969 and into the 1970s. There were a few casual flared leg pants designed as early as 1967, but for the most part, flared jeans and bell-bottom pants were not part of the 1960s. Even the hippies wore straight-leg pants in the 1960s. Learn more about 1960s pants, capris, jeans and culottes.

1960s Suits

Women's 60s suits, like the '50s, were dresses (or skirt and top separates) worn with a matching short jacket. They were the most professional choice for looking polished and lady-like.

Mature women liked the tailored suits with pencil skirts and cropped jackets, while young women embraced the knit suit with an open cardigan style jacket or light blazer.

As shocking as a 1960s mini skirt was to society, there was an equal confusion over the new pantsuit. It was a look directly copied from men's suits, but tailored down to feminine proportions.

Some 1960s work offices and establishments forbade women from wearing pantsuits. There was confusion over whether they were an insult to femininity or empowerment for women (which "disrespected men").

While 1960s fashion magazines debated, women flocked to the stores to buy pantsuits. Women were already wearing casual pants everywhere else, so wearing dressy pants seemed only natural.

Jumpsuits were another outfit that emerged in the late 1960s. These ultra wide leg one piece top and bottom overalls came in dramatic prints with big belts to match.

Many 1960s jumpsuits were sleeveless but could be worn over a blouse. They could be worn for lounging around the house or hosting an elegant house party.

They differed from the 1970s jumpsuit with a straight, wide palazzo leg.

Two peice jumpsuit looking sets were a matching tunic top and palazzo pant. Shop 60s and 70s jumpsuits.

1960s Shoes and Stockings

With women's 1960s legs now fully exposed by short hemlines and the youthful girl look on-trend, shoes took a drastic turn from high fashion with high heels to street fashion with low to no heels. Flats were in. Cheap was in. Color was in. Sophistication was out.

Thanks to new materials, notably PVC (Vinyl), women's 60s shoes could be mass-produced for cheap and come in a lot of bright colors to match dresses. The low heel made them easy to walk and live life in.

All the footwear designs of the earlier decades- loafers, Mary Janes, T-straps, monk straps, ballet, saddle shoes, and Oxfords - were designed into a low heeled shoe for the '60s.

Tall and skinny stiletto heels were still an option for evenings in the 1960s. The single strap Mary Jane came back in fashion, as did the slingback with cutouts on the sides.

Even 60s boots had flat heels. Thanks to an interest in all things futuristic looking, tall boots in white or silver became the new black. Everyone wore them.

1960s boots looked great with short dresses and mini skirts.

Tall white boots were called go-go boots, named after night club dancers in LA who wore them. Teens loved them and wore them with mini skirts to school (if they were allowed). Go Go boots are the most iconic shoe of the 1960s.

In the late '60s, suede boots in natural colors dominated fall and winter fashions. Both tall and short boot styles were worn with short shift dresses. Booties could be worn with long pants too.

Most 1960s boots were step in or pull on styles with a side zipper. The lace up boot was coming into style closer to the 1970s.

In the summer, it was the 1960s sandal heel, flip flop, and mule that had women feeling cool in the heat.

1960s summer shoe colors were bright and the straps were either very wide or very skinny.

Women's 60s sandal heels had a closed square toe, whereas casual sandals had a large open toe. Sandals were every woman's new favorite shoe. They could be worn with almost any outfit at any time of day, and not look out of place.

Women's 1960s casual shoes were canvas flat sneakers that we often refer as the brand name "Keds" today.

Keds were either slip-on loafers or lace-up sneakers in bright, happy colors, chosen to coordinate with an outfit. They were cheap, so women could afford to have one in every color. In the spring and summer, they were worn without socks.
Shop 1960s Style Shoes.
Read more about ALL the 1960s shoe styles here.

1960s Colored tights were worn with short skirts and dresses in a variety of colors and textures: white, black, purple, yellow, green, orange, fishnet, herringbone, ribbed, and lace. Tights covered up ugly knees and didn't cause garter straps like sheer stockings did.

Once pantyhose were perfected, they were the savior of women's legs anywhere. 1960s pantyhose camouflaged hair, bumps, bruises, and wide kneecaps. Even skin tone tights were thick and dark. To go bare-legged with dresses in the '60s was still too immodest. Ironic?

Shop colorful tights and socks inspired by the 1960s.

Tall socks could be worn instead of tights in the sixties. Chunky rib knits with a fold-down cuff were a mainstay for teens and young adults. All primary colors were worn as well as deep textures: waffle, cable knit, ribbed, honeycomb and others.

1960s Jewelry

Colorful women's clothing needed equally colorful 1960s jewelry.

In the early 60s, traditional jewelry continued to favor textured gold, white pastel, and colored pearls. These pretty and safe designs complemented the feminine 1950s style clothing.

The one change to traditional jewelry was the length. Longer pearls and tassel tip necklaces were preferred over the older short styles.

1960s necklaces hung down low on plain front shift dresses but were usually of a matching color so as not to distract from the dress. Round button earrings or small chandelier earrings matched 60s necklaces.

The new youth with their obsession with fake plastics, vinyl, and bold colors favored jewelry inspired by Pop Art.

Geometric shapes made their way onto over-sized dangling earrings.

Large chunky bangles or stacks of thin bracelets jingled up and down bare arms.

Novelty shapes were still popular, but they embraced brighter colors and more comical themes.

The same went for flowers, now made from plastic resins. They were cheerful pastel or primary-colored clusters hanging from 60s necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.
Shop 1960s inspired jewelry.
Learn more about 1960s jewelry styles here.

1960s Hairstyles

Without a hat to call attention to a woman's head, 1960s hairstyles became a new focus for women. The 60s bouffant hairstyle teased hair to new heights... literally.

Guiche curls kissed her cheeks (made possible by a bit of nail polish to keep them pointed to a crisp). All that volume made faces appear smaller and more doll-like.

60s hair length rose from shoulder to chin to cropped above the ears as the decade progressed, only to come crashing down again in the '70s.

See more examples of 1960s hairstyles here.

Headbands were a trendy 60s hair accessory. Simple, wide satin headbands swept hair away from the face.

Hair scarves/bandannas were also trendy in the later half of the decade.

Cloche hats experienced a revival with the mod look. Pillbox hats and flower pot hats were in style with the early 60s looks.

Shop hats, hair accessories, and wigs here.

1960s Makeup

The early 60s makeup saw the exaggerated cat eye and full red lip continue. Eyebrows were shaped into subtle peak instead of a high curve. Pink blush was subtle and almost non-existent.

There were also 1960s makeup styles for the mod look (AKA babydoll face), specialty products for black women, looks for eveningwear, and others.

Powder - Flesh tone.

Blush - Soft rose pink.

Eye Shadow - White-pink, purple, light blue, aqua.

Eye Liner - Dark brown or black, top and bottom lined and extended outwards.

Lipstick - Deep pink, orange-red.

Eyebrows - Shaped into a soft peak.

Learn more about 1960s makeup.

Late 1960s Fashion: The Hippie Look

The late '60s saw a movement of anti-fashion, a political statement that grew so popular it became a mainstream fashion style. Real hippie clothing and hippie fashion were completely different.

Early on in the 1960s movement, festival going hippies wore mainstream fashions such as the shift dress in psychedelic colors of 1966-68. Tye-die was popular in 1968, taking plain white men's undershirts and dyeing them with multiple colors. The more color, the better - and the gaudier the colors, the better!

In 1968-69, the fashion shifted to earth tones, faded denim jeans, embroidered tops and tunics, and handmade accessories such as headbands, friendship bracelets, and hair wraps.

The flower child decoration of patches, embroidery, painting, and peace signs were added by many hippies to make their jeans feel less commercial or to make an anti-war statement.

60s Hippie fashion influenced mainstream designers who turned back to the down to earth, homemade, ethnic arts and crafts styles. Forest green with brown suede, and sunshine yellow with denim blue were signature colors of the ethnic-hippie '60s.

Crochet pieces, suede vests, wood beads, headbands, sandals, and embroidered trim decorated shift dresses or flared jeans. It was a blend of current silhouettes and folk art decoration.

Learn more about 60s hippie fashion influences, history of 60s hippie clothes and check out these 10 hippie outfit ideas.

The 1970s continued the hippie trend into mainstream fashion. The youth-oriented looks turned to the complete opposite - granny style.

Romanticized granny clothes from several generations ago, like pioneer women, returned fashion back to long dresses and sleeves, ruffles, lace trim, small cotton prints, and long hair (worn down this time, not up).

The age of the mini skirt "grew up" and turned into adults, not like their parents but instead like those of generations before, which seemed to have a simple life that hippies idolized.

Continue learning about 1970s fashion here.

More 60s History and Outfit Ideas

Need more help with your 60s outfit? Just ask us anytime!

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1960s fashion history for women. A return to youth, shocking colors, shorter hemlines, pop art and the hippie movement. What did women wear? Answered.

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Paraffin Winter is a murder mystery novel available as an ebook. To find out more, see 'The Novel' page, or download the first chapter. The novel is set in 1963 - for a glimpse of life in early sixties UK, explore the pictures below. For a text-only version, click here

At the beginning of the sixties, popular music was at a turning point. The fifties had seen new styles of music aimed at young people emerge, with skiffle music popular in the UK, along with Rock and Roll music imported from the USA and home-grown acts such as Cliff Richard and the Shadows. But although skiffle was popular with the more rebellious young people, it didn't reach the mainstream, nor did it become properly established. Music critics, particularly the older ones, saw it as a passing fad.

Although by later standards, music from the early sixties seems pretty tame, it was considered to be dangerously passionate at the time, compared to the sweetly bland mainstream of the 1950s. In 1961, Helen Shapiro became suddenly very popular with young people - boys, in particular. At the age of fourteen, she had two number one hits in the UK: "You Don't Know" and "Walkin' Back to Happiness"; and, indeed, her first four single releases all went into the top three of the UK Singles Chart. Before she was sixteen years old, Shapiro had been voted Britain's 'Top Female Singer'. The Beatles' first national tour of Britain in the late winter/early spring of 1963 was as her supporting act.

The Beatles released their first single, 'Love Me Do', in October 1962, which reached no. 17 in the UK official charts. This was followed up by 'Please Please Me', in January 1963, which reached no. 2. This record brought the Beatles to national attention and began their superstar careers, although was not without its controversy - some interpreted the lyrics as a reference to oral sex. Early 1963 saw the beginnings of modern 'pop' music, with the 'Merseybeat' sound, including other Liverpool musicians such as the Searchers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and others. Until then, 'pop' musicians hadn't released LPs of their music - LPs were mostly classical, easy listening, or music from shows. All that changed when The Beatles released their Please Please Me LP, which instantly went to number one in the UK charts, and changed popular music forever.

Paraffin.

Paraffin from the UK is what's known as kerosene in the USA, where 'paraffin' usually means paraffin wax.In the 1960s, it was a cheap and popular domestic heating fuel, used in portable heaters, often delivered door-to-door.

There were three main brands of paraffin: Esso Blue, Aladdin Pink (from Shell) and Regent Green, which was the least common.Esso Blue was advertised on television, and was consequently probably the most popular. Television adverts featured a cartoon 'paraffin man' called Joe, and an 'Esso Blue' jingle.Each brand claimed to be better than the others, of course, saying they produced less smoke or burned longer.But there probably was little or no difference between them, beyond different coloured dyes used in them (paraffin is colourless, like all petroleum distillates).

The paraffin-fuelled sump heater used by Ronnie was a common way of keeping the oil in a car engine warm overnight, and consequently less thick. This made the car easier to start.

Paraffin is useful as a relatively safe domestic fuel because, unlike petrol/gasoline, it doesn't burn at room temperature unless it's adsorbed onto a wick or warmed to produce a vapour.Nowadays, by far the biggest use of paraffin/kerosene is as fuel for jet aircraft.

Shopping.

In 1963, people did their regular shopping in small, corner shops, or local shopping arcades. Nevertheless, supermarkets were becoming more dominant, and were getting bigger. Sainsbury's opened the first self-service supermarket in 1950, although they were also the last supermarket to convert all their shops to self-service - the last counter service Sainsbury's didn't close until 1982. But by 1963, even the main supermarkets were still small, with shops in smaller town centres. The era of large, out-of-town hypermarkets had not yet dawned.

Many local shops were very enterprising, carrying a wide range of goods. A small, local general store would often sell a wide range of groceries, as well as hardware and gardening products. By the sixties however, most goods were produced and distributed by national suppliers, with locally sourced produce already disappearing.

In larger town centres, department stores dominated. These sold pretty much everything, although some specialised more in one particular area (fashion, for example) than others. Bournemouth had five department stores: Bobbys, Plummers, Brights, Beales and Bealsons. Most of these big stores were independently owned, but were later bought up by chains such as Debenhams and House of Fraser, and many were closed
The vacuum-powered devices for giving change, as described in the book, were also commonplace, as shop assistants didn't have access to cash registers. Instead, they took the money from a customer, and sealed it in a container with an invoice. This was put into a tube, where it wooshed off up to the cashiers office. Here, the invoice was checked, stamped as paid, put back into the container with the change, and wooshed back down to the shop floor. The process was spectacularly time-consuming, originating in a less rushed and more contemplative age.

Old money

Before Britain 'went decimal' in 1971, the currency was based on pounds, shillings and pence. There were twelve pennies in a shilling, and twenty shillings in a pound. So there were 2.4 old pennies to a new, post-decimal penny.

The smallest unit of currency, the farthing (a quarter of a penny) had been abolished in 1952. By 1963, the coins in circulation were: halfpenny (or ha'penny); penny; threepence (pronounced, and sometimes spelt, thruppence); sixpence (sometimes called a 'tanner'); shilling (sometimes called a 'bob'); a two-shilling piece (formerly known as a florin, but this was antiquated by the 1960s); and a half-crown (two shillings and sixpence). Crowns were only issued to celebrate special occasions, and were not generally in circulation.
In notes, there was a ten shilling note (brown), a pound note (green), and a five pound note (blue). As now, a pound was known as a 'quid'. There were also (and still are) some other colloquial terms used for sums of money, originating from London, including a 'pony' (£50), a 'monkey' (£500), and a 'grand' (£1,000).

Confusingly, some goods and services, for example furniture and professional services, were priced in guineas. A guinea was one pound and one shilling.

Sweets.

This was a time when children were treated to delights such as sweet cigarettes and sweet tobacco, to make sure they got the habit early. Many a child was happy to receive at Christmas a special chocolate 'junior smoker's set, including sweet cigarettes, chocolate cigars and a chocolate pipe.

There was a wide range of loose sweets, weighed from big jars, including sweet peanuts, sherbet lemons, acid drops and lemonade powder (which made your tongue bleed!). Other popular pocket money confectionery included Spangles (pre-wrapped boiled sweets that came in a huge variety of flavours), barley sugar sticks, liquorice bootlaces, mini bars of chocolate (costing a penny each), penny chews, fruit salads and black jacks (small chews, four for a penny) jamboree bags (large paper bags containing a couple of dolly mixtures, a stick of liquorice, a joke, and a useless plastic toy - never good value), and polo fruits. Polos (still around today, as mints) had a hole in the middle. Spangles were square, with a dimple in the middle - hence the kid on the estate's joke about 'what do you call a virgin polo mint' ...

But the most popular brands of confectionery in the early 1960s were much the same as today: Crunchie, Bounty, KitKat, Opal Fruits (now Starburst), Mars, Milky Way, Caramac, Smarties, Fruit Gums and Fruit Pastilles were all available in 1963. Indeed, eight out of ten of the most popular confectionery brands in the UK have been available for more than 50 years.

Heating.

Paraffin heaters were commonplace, and were a cheap and effective way of keeping a room warm. There were two kinds: ones with a wick that burned the paraffin, and ones that had a capillary burner, burning the paraffin on a metal mesh dome. These were the ones that made an occasional 'gloop-gloop-gloop' sound as the paraffin ran through to the burner. The primary disadvantage of paraffin heaters was that, as they were unvented, they produced large amounts of water vapour, which condensed on cold windows and walls. They could also get knocked over and cause sudden, intense fires. Later versions were fitted with safety devices that extinguished the flame if the heater was tipped from vertical.

Coal was delivered to most houses, and stored in an outside bunker. Typically, only the most commonly used room would have a coal fire burning, although all rooms in older houses would have had a fireplace. Fires were only lit in bedrooms when someone was ill. Water was often heated in a 'back boiler' behind the fireplace, a way of using the heat from an open coal fire to make hot water. It was a cheap way to heat water (using heat from the fire that would otherwise go up the chimney) but it took more than an hour to produce a usable amount. Wall mounted gas fuelled water heaters were also used, typically in flats that didn't have open fires. These were usually known as 'Geysers', and had a reputation for exploding when the water boiled.

Motoring.

Motoring in 1963 was more of a DIY experience than it is today. Most working class people didn't have a car, and if they did, it was usually old and kept running with bits from scrapyards, so it was important to understand how a car worked. Most cars needed minor servicing every 1,000 miles, with more major servicing every 5,000 miles. If you scraped together enough money to buy a car, it's unlikely you'd be able to afford to get it serviced in a garage, so this was a job to be taken on yourself. Car handbooks usually had details of what servicing was needed and when, so it was a job most could tackle. And because there were fewer cars around, second-hand cars held their value much better than cars do nowadays - a ten year old car in good condition wouldn't have dropped much below half its original value.

The car in the picture is a 1952 Austin A30 four door, like the one Ronnie buys. It was a popular, reliable vehicle (there are plenty of them still running). But batteries were unreliable and had a habit of suddenly failing, especially in cars with six volt electrics. So a starting handle was essential - this engaged with the front end of the crankshaft, in a notched spiral lug that pushed the handle forward when the engine started. However, if the engine backfired, and turned suddenly backwards, the handle didn't disengage - this could break your thumb if you weren't careful!

In spite of all that, motoring was arguably more of a pleasure, simply because there were fewer cars on the roads. It was still possible to find quiet, country roads where you'd have the place to yourself. Progress could be slow, there were few by-passes around towns and only one motorway (the M1 opened in 1959). But there were no yellow lines and few parking restrictions - you could drive into the middle of town and park outside the shop you needed to visit. By 1963 however, more people were buying cars, and vehicles such as the Austin A30, Morris Minor and Ford Popular had brought motoring within the grasp of working people. By the end of the decade, traffic jams and crowded roads were commonplace, and the joys of peaceful motoring largely disappeared.

Booze.

Bottled beers were popular in the early sixties, with the first canned beer (Long Life) new to the market. Hand-pumped draught beer was still available, but was already fast disappearing, to be replaced by fizzy keg beer. This was often poor quality and low in alcoholic strength - at that time, brewers did not have to reveal the strength of their beer. One brand (Watney's 'Starlight') was eventually outed as so low in alcohol that it could be sold in sweet shops as a soft drink. This led to organisations such as the Campaign for Real Ale successful lobbying for the re-introduction of hand-pumped, 'real' beer in most pubs, by the 1990s. Lager was a specialised drink, only available in bottles, not drunk by many people.

Babycham was introduced in the 1950s as the first alcoholic drink marketed specifically for women. It was described as a 'champagne perry' giving the impression that it tasted like champagne, although is actually made from pears. The brand was revived in the late 1990s, and is still going strong.

In the early 1960s, working class British people rarely, if ever, drank wine, beyond possibly a glass of German Liebfraumilch or Riesling on special occasions. Liqueurs like Tia Maria or Drambuie were popular, as were spirits, notably the ubiquitous Johnnie Walker whisky. Although many people kept a limited range of alcoholic drinks at home, trips out to the pub to drink were more common, with many more local, street corner pubs still operating, and no breathalyser - people hardly even considered whether they should drink and drive, they just did.

The Profumo Affair.

In 1961, John Profumo, the Conservative Secretary of State for War, had an affair with a 'showgirl' called Christine Keeler. At that time, such matters were usually considered private, and ignored by the press. Although the affair was short-lived, it so happened that, at the same time, Keeler was also having an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché based at the Russian Embassy. The consequences for national security seemed too obvious for this 'private' matter to remain private.

Nevertheless, it was not until March 1963 that George Wigg, a Labour MP, in collaboration with senior Labour party figures, including Harold Wilson and Tom Driberg, accused Profumo of the affair in the House of Commons (where statements are exempt from libel laws). Profumo initially denied it, but now the story hit the press. Profumo was eventually forced to admit that the affair took place, and resigned as a government minister in June 1963. Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister, in September 1963, after an official report on the matter. It was said that his health had been affected by the scandal (although he continued as an active member of the House of Lords as the Earl of Stockton until his death in 1986).

Valerie Hobson, a former British Hollywood actress, and John Profumo's wife, stuck by him throughout the crisis. After Profumo's resignation, he and Hobson dedicated their lives to charity work, washing dishes and helping out in a homeless shelter in the East End of London.

The Profumo Affair changed the attitude of the press to the private lives of MPs and other public figures. After this, it was no longer possible for those in the public eye to assume that their personal lives were beyond scrutiny. It was the beginning of the end of the cover-up of the 'private' misdeeds of those in public life, which had gone on for centuries.

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Paraffin Winter is a murder mystery novel available as an ebook. To find out more, see 'The Novel' page, or download the first chapter. The novel is set in 1963 - for a glimpse of life in early sixties UK, explore the pictures below.

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Pour les exposés présentés en classe

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What is BONFIRE NIGHT? | British Traditions & Culture

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TASK 2 - Watch the video and take notes about the following topics, then present it orally to the class.

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TASK 2 - Watch the video and take notes about the following topics, then present it orally to the class.

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a) London in 2016
b) The Sex Pistols
c) Punk 1976-78, the exhibition at the British Library
d) Punk phenomenon (music, style...)
e) Social context of the punk era
f) Joe Corre's gesture and opinion
g) Punk music nowadays
h) Conclusion of the report

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Britain celebrating 40 years of punk music

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To download and use until you get the real book

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A version of this article appears in the book London Fictions, edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White - and published by Five Leaves. You can order it from the publishers here

My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don't care - Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere.
​
In the opening paragraph of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, the seventeen-year-old narrator feels compelled to announce his nationality three times. At first, Karim is semi-apologetic (he's almost English) but by the third declaration he is defiantly not proud of it. No other English novel begins this way. It is set in the 1970s, when the fact that Karim has an English mother and an Indian father means that he is constantly asked where he is from, as if his very existence required some kind of explanation. He is not English enough (too brown) for some, nor Indian enough (he's never been there)
for others.

In 1990 there were hardly any English novels about growing up as a mixed race child so The Buddha of Suburbia and Kureishi's first film with Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette, were important interventions in the debate about what it means to be British in the wake of postwar immigration. A lot of critical attention has quite rightly been paid to this. Now, in large part because of Kureishi's work, multiculturalism is mainstream. So this is a particularly a good moment to look back at less discussed but equally significant aspect of The Buddha of Suburbia: its treatment of class and the links between class and place.

London's unglamorous suburbs have attracted much less literary attention than the city proper, and it is rare for a novel to flaunt its suburban origins in the title. Kureishi, like Karim, was born in Bromley in 1954. His father, who came from an aristocratic Indian family, was employed by the Pakistani Embassy in London; while his white English mother worked in a shoe shop.

​The young Kureishi moved to west London to study philosophy at King's College and had his first plays performed at the Royal Court theatre in Sloane Square. He has lived on the same page of the A-Z all his adult life and, with the exception of the Bradford setting of his film My Son the Fanatic, all his films and novels have been inspired by the city. The Buddha of Suburbia zigzags north and south of the river, from periphery to core of the city, as Karim tries to find himself: no locality turns out to be quite what either he, or the reader, expects.

The opening paragraph announces not only that Karim has emerged 'from two old histories' but also that he is from the 'South London suburbs and going somewhere'. The journey from a boy's bedroom in Bromley to 'the centre of this old city' charts his struggle to 'locate [himself]' as a new breed of Englishman, but Karim is also navigating his way around the class system. Each locality in the novel is precisely depicted in terms of class markers: Karim is desperate to escape suburban stagnation but sceptical of pretentious social climbing, hierarchies and authoritarianism.

The Buddha of Suburbia is divided into two parts: In the Suburbs and In the City. It seems at first as if the novel is straightforwardly linear. Karim progresses from the margins to the centre and from the suburban lower middle class (with a future as a clerk or car mechanic) to the growing metropolitan middle class (working in the theatre, media or academia). Moreover, at least superficially, the novel seems to uphold the conventional opposition between 'suburbia' and the 'city': Bromley epitomises philistinism while London is the cultural capital.

The suburbs which give the book part of its title are 'a leaving place' while the city is 'bottomless in its temptations'. On the eve of his departure from Bromley, at the end of part one, Karim fantasises about London and what he will do there. Although it is only twenty miles away, it is another world entirely:

There was a sound that London had. ... There were kids dressed in velvet cloaks who lived free lives: there were thousands of black people everywhere, so I wouldn't feel exposed; there were bookshops with racks of magazines printed without capital letters or the bourgeois disturbance of full stops; there were shops selling all the records you could desire; there were parties where boys and girls you didn't know took you upstairs and fucked you; there were all the drugs you could use. You see, I didn't ask much of life; this was the extent of my longing.

The city represents freedom and anonymity: more, 1970s London is breathlessly anticipated as a countercultural cornucopia. It is the absolute antithesis of suburbia most significantly, perhaps, in terms of racism. Moving to London means an end to the painful sense of exposure which Karim suffers in the mainly white suburbs and a new safety in numbers. Unlike many coming-to-London novels, the city isn't a disappointment: 'So this was London at last, and nothing gave me more pleasure than strolling around my new possession all day'. But within the novel's basic framework of suburban dullness and bigotry versus metropolitan, multicultural playground, there is considerably more complexity.

Kureishi's suburbs are frequently weirder and madder than we might expect. Partly because it is set against the background of suburban uniformity, Haroon's transformation from civil servant and commuter into yoga teacher and Eastern mystic, takes on a surreal quality. As he sneaks out of his respectable semi-detached, wearing a red and gold waistcoat and pyjamas concealed beneath his overcoat, he announces proudly: 'They are looking forward to me all over Orpington', delighted for the first time to be listened to with respect.

The South London suburbs are portrayed as anything but a homogeneous mass of semis. On the contrary, Karim calibrates the social status and gradations of culture in each neighbourhood meticulously. His family inhabits a respectable lower middle class area, which his step-mother, Eva calls 'the higher depths'. Setting off from the cul-de-sac which is Victoria Road, Karim and his friends Jamila and Helen walk to the pub: 'Past turdy parks, past the Victorian school with outside toilets, past the numerous bomb sites which were our true playgrounds and sexual schools, and past the neat gardens and scores of front rooms containing familiar strangers and televisions shining like dying lights.' Bromley combines degraded public spaces with a philistine display of private status.

There is nothing in Bromley to make Karim want to stay even though he has no clear idea how he is going to get out. His first step on the road to London is Beckenham, which is upper class by Victoria Road standards. When they arrive at Eva's house, Karim, sounding like a budding estate agent, notes that it had 'a little drive and a garage and a car. Their place stood on its own in a tree-lined road just off Beckenham High Street. It also had bay windows, an attic, a greenhouse, three bedrooms and central heating'. It's not (only) the display of money that impresses Karim, rather he's seduced by the combination of sensuality and intellectualism. But, despite the bidet and the bamboo scrolls, the talk of 'music and books, of names like Dvorak, Krishnamurti and Eclectic', Beckenham typifies only a pretentious simulation of culture.

Beckenham represents a premonition of what is on offer in the city and proof that there's more to the suburbs than DIY and conformity. According to Karim it may be populated by advertising executives at best but suburbia has also been the incubator of genuine musical talent. Ray Davies, David Gilmour, Roger Daltrey are all suburban boys and David Bowie, Bromley's most famous son after H. G. Wells, is worshipped by the kids in The Buddha. The novel nods in approval of suburban English pop when Karim persuades his father to stop for a pint at the Three Tuns in Beckenham, where Bowie's career began. It's full of boys wearing 'cataracts of velvet and satin, and bright colours; some were in bedspreads and curtains'.

Biding his time until he can get to London, Karim sizes up Chislehurst, the venue for Haroon's second guru gig: 'The houses [...] had greenhouses, grand oaks and sprinklers on the lawn; men came in to do the gardens'. But this is a detour which gets him no nearer to London than Bromley. Closer geographically to the centre but way down the class ladder is Penge, where Karim's best friend Jamila lives with her parents above a grotty corner shop called Paradise Stores:

The area ... was closer to London than our suburbs, and far poorer. It was full of neo-fascist groups, thugs who had their own pubs and clubs and shops. On Saturdays they'd be out in the High Street selling their newspapers and pamphlets. They also operated outside the schools and colleges and football grounds, like Millwall and Crystal Palace. At night they roamed the streets, beating Asians and shoving shit and burning rags through their letter-boxes.

As the pigs' heads fly through the shop window and Jamila's father is racially harassed in the street, her family live with a fear of violence that Karim does not have to deal with on a daily basis in Bromley. South London is a shit-hole of poverty and racism; the streets are more dangerous than in the suburbs and domestic life is equally miserable.

Naveen Andrews, Roshan Seth and Susan Fleetwood in the 1993 TV adaptation

Hanif Kureishi, Naveen Andrews and David Bowie - davidbowienews.com

Guided by his step-mother, Eva, Karim eventually gets to smart, central London. The initial setting is West Kensington: nearest tube, Barons Court. The author describes the area as caught between 'expensive Kensington, where rich ladies shopped' and Earls Court. Typically, it's the latter that attracts Karim's attention, an area full of 'small hotels smelling of spunk and disinfectant, Australian travel agents, all-night shops run by dwarfish Bengalis, leather bars with fat moustached queens exchanging secret signals outside, and roaming strangers with no money and searching eyes'.

Although West Kensington is made up of 'rows of peeling stucco houses broken up into bed-sits' what matters to Karim is that it is on the cultural map:

Unlike the suburbs, where no-one of note - except H. G. Wells - had lived, here you couldn't get away from VIPs. Gandhi himself had once had a room in West Kensington, and the notorious landlord Rachman kept a flat for the young Mandy Rice-Davies in the next street; Christine Keeler came for tea. IRA bombers stayed in tiny rooms and met in Hammersmith pubs, singing 'Arms for the IRA' at closing time. Mesrine had had a room by the tube station.

What more could you ask from your neighbourhood? Just as Karim assesses suburbanites according to their driveway, greenhouse, and the contents of their bathroom and bookshelves, so he values Londoners in relation to their 'cultural capital' and their post code.

He is thrilled to be offered a job in a radical theatre company in Chelsea, where he meets the beautiful, upper-class Eleanor. He is drawn like a magnet to her flat in Ladbroke Grove:

An area that was slowly being reconstituted by the rich, but where Rasta dope dealers still hung around outside the pubs; inside, they chopped up the hash on the table with their knives. There were also many punks around now ... And there were the kids who were researchers and editors and the like: they'd been at Oxford together and they swooped up to wine bars in bright little red and blue Italian cars, afraid they would be broken into by black kids, but too politically polite to acknowledge this.

Eleanor's set, 'with their combination of class, culture and money,' represent the 'apogee' of Karim's 'social rise', a 'cocktail' that intoxicates Karim's soul.

Karim wants to be accepted and approved of by London's bohemian aristocracy, and he is ecstatic to be invited to St John's Wood: 'Sensational, I thought ... We'd changed at Piccadilly and were heading north-west, to Brainyville, London, a place as remote to me as Marseilles. What reason had I to go to St. John's Wood before?' But Brainyville turns out not to be quite the cultural jackpot that Karim had anticipated. His dream of clever people, artistic fame and hedonism in London is undermined by an awareness of how phoney the rich can be, even the really cultured rich.

The bohemian elite trample all over Karim's dream of London, he is not sure where to go next. Part of him simply wants to crawl home and lick his wounds but he doesn't know where home is anymore.

At various crucial moments in the novel, the forward march of progress from the suburbs to the city is interrupted by a sudden swerve towards South London. This is not simply a reaction against the hollow men and women of the arty metropolis, but because it represents a genuine alternative. After Brainyville, Karim is tempted to move to Brixton, where Terry and his 'socialist workers' are squatting and planning the revolution. He gets more involved with Jamila's activist commune in Peckham.

The fact that the novel is divided into two parts might suggest that there are only two terms up for grabs. But there is a third value and locality: neither suburbs nor city but urban south London; Jamila's subversive in-between space. Jamila is clearly the political heroine of the novel. An anti-racist march that she organises is the most important event in the book - even though Karim misses it. If his story is not simply a postcolonial snob's progress this is largely because of Jamila in South London. It's no wonder, then, that with his lucrative but trashy role in a soap opera at the end of the novel, Karim both celebrates his journey to the centre and knows everything is still a mess.

Susie Thomas edited The Buddha of Suburbia was going to be called The Streets of My Heart, a title which emphasizes the fact that the novel is, on one level, a sentimental education as Karim struggles to 'learn what the heart is'. The first title also suggests that this is an urban novel in which the streets, instead of being a place of danger as so often in London literature, are the locus of erotic possibility.

In some ways, A Reader's Guide to Hanif Kureishi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) The Streets of My Heart might seem to reflect the contents of the novel more accurately. After all, only the first part of the novel is actually set in the suburbs; and Karim's father, the eponymous Buddha, fades from view for much of the second part. Despite this, the title The Buddha of Suburbia is not only more catchy and original but also emphasizes the heterogeneity of the novel's suburbs, which are not all steely conformity and twitching net curtains. 'Was I conceived like this,' Karim wonders, 'in the suburban night air, to the wailing of Christian curses from the mouth of a renegade Muslim masquerading as a Buddhist?'

Even though Karim can't wait to get away from them, Kureishi transformed the traditional view of London's suburbs, making them a far more interesting place.

​

Down on My Knees in Suburbia

Walking around Bromley today, the architecture does not seem to have changed dramatically in the years since The Buddha of Suburbia was published. The area feels more spruced up than in the pages of the novel; the bomb sites are long gone and the parks are well kept. The defining difference between Bromley in the 1970s and now has less to do with bricks and mortar than racism.

'Down on my knees in suburbia / Down on myself in every way' - Bowie's haunting soundtrack to the film adaptation of Kureishi's novel, made for the BBC in 1993, accompanies Karim (played by Naveen Andrews) as he whizzes along the streets of Beckenham, Chislehurst and Penge on his bicycle. Bromley could be seen as a crucible for the sometimes bloody revolution in attitudes to Englishness that has been wrought in the suburbs. England's post-war history of immigration is often referred to in the binary terms of ethnically diverse city and monocultural countryside; very little attention is paid to the suburbs, where most people live.
​

In a key early scene in the novel, Karim visits Helen, a girl from his school, and is brutally dismissed by her father as 'a wog' and 'little coon', before being set on by a Great Dane. Typically, Karim tries to laugh off the humiliation by saying the dog was in love with him: its quick movements against his arse told him so. But later in the novel he admits that the racist insults made by Hairy Back (as he dubs Helen's father) made him 'nauseous with anger and humiliation'. There is no 'whining about being spat on at school' in The Buddha and the routine racism in the suburbs is contemptuously shrugged off for the most part. Nonetheless, when Karim returns to Bromley, his sense of oppression is palpable. The first person he sees is Hairy Back: 'How could he stand there so innocently when he'd abused me? ... I knew it did me good to be reminded how much I loathed the suburbs, and that I had to continue my journey into London and a new life, ensuring I got away from people and streets like this'.

In his landmark essay, 'The Rainbow Sign' (1986), Kureishi removed the comic mask in order to describe his childhood in Bromley with his white English mother and his Pakistani father: 'From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to be rid of it. I wanted to be like everybody else. I read with understanding a story in a newspaper about a black boy who, when he noticed that burnt skin turned white, jumped into a bath of boiling water'. This shame and denial were compounded by the absence of any vocabulary with which to resist the racist culture of demeaning subordination and stigmatisation. Nothing was said: nobody in the family seemed to talk about what happened to them outside the house when they came home.
​

In 2012 I had lunch at an Indian restaurant in Bromley with Kureishi's sister, Yasmin, and his late mother, who was then still living in the semi-detached house in a quiet cul-de-sac which was the fictional model for Karim's home. His sister said that as a teenager she loathed going out in Bromley and was glad to have got away to boarding school. His mother still seemed pained and incredulous at the very idea of colour prejudice and insisted that she knew nothing about the racist abuse her son had suffered until she read about it in The Buddha of Suburbia: it was a shock. If she had known he was being spat on at school, she insisted, she would have complained. The mother's ignorance seemed to exasperate her daughter: either because she didn't believe her mother hadn't known, or because she felt Mrs Kureishi should have known better.

When I asked Yasmin about her father she seemed to think that his charisma allowed him 'to transcend racism'. Although the one thing that all the family seem to agree on is that Shanoo Kureishi loved his home in the suburbs, Yasmin's belief that he was untouched by racism seemed to mirror her mother's wishful thinking. Yasmin said that she had known about what happened to her brother alright because 'he took it out' on her.

​As I walked back to the house, away from her daughter's watchful gaze, Mrs Kureishi said that when her son was about five years old he had come home upset, asking why he had been called a nigger.
I wondered what she had found to say and she replied, sadly, that she just hadn't known how to respond. As a teenager in his bedroom in Bromley, Kureishi began his first novel, 'Run Hard Black Man': he had to find his own answers through writing. His father couldn't help him find the way; although in The Buddha of Suburbia they have a good time trying:

Growing up in Bromley today would certainly be very different from forty years ago when the novel was set. Crucially, the area is now casually multicultural and groups of school kids - black, white, Asian - were chatting in the park during the lunch hour. Doubtless it has the pervasive problems brought about by austerity and Brexit, but a mixed race boy in 2020 would not stand out painfully, as Karim does in the novel.

​Black Lives Matter has demonstrated that racist violence is not a thing of the past, but at least no one has to suffer in silence. Through its wit and honesty, its sweetness and brutality, The Buddha of Suburbia made speaking about the essential questions of class, sex and racism that much more possible.

Hanif Kureishi's archive is lodged at the British Library. The online collection contains interviews and articles on his work, including Zadie Smith's brilliant account of passing round The Buddha of Suburbia under the desk at school.
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/zadie-smith-on-the-buddha-of-suburbia

Hanif Kureishi, My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father, Faber and Faber, 2004

Hanif Kureishi, 'Knock, Knock, it's Enoch', Guardian (12 December 2014):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/12/enoch-powell-hanif-kureishi

Hanif Kureishi, 'There were no books about people like me', Guardian (25 April 2020):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/25/there-were-no-books-about-people-like-me-so-i-wrote-one-myself-hanif-kureishi-on-the-buddha-of-suburbia

Bradley Buchanan, Hanif Kureishi, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Susan Alice Fischer (ed.), Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Bloomsbury, 2015

Bart Moore-Gilbert, Hanif Kureishi, Manchester University Press, 2001

Ruvani Ranasinha, Hanif Kureishi, Northcote House, 2002

Sukhdev Sandhu, 'Pop Goes the Centre' in London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, Harper Collins, 2003

Nahem Yousaf, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, Continuum, 2002
​

[​Posted February 2011; revised and reformatted August 2020]

All rights to the text remain with the author

Many thanks to Hanif Kureishi for permission to use photos of him when young - these remain his copyright
​
And here's the link to the London Fictions home page

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A version of this article appears in the book London Fictions, edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White - and published by Five Leaves. You can order it from the publishers here My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost.

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"My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories."

So opens Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia. That "almost" almost killed me. I remember the day I got that book out of the library. I'd seen advertisements for the BBC2 television show - starring Naveen Andrews, soundtracked by David Bowie - and thought: "There's no way my parents are going to let me watch that." Definitely too much sex. The one loophole, though, was my library card.

My family did not do things together regularly. My parents worked seven days a week on a small business, both too tired to do anything other than feed my sister and me, insist that we did our homework, and remind us of our responsibilities: speak good English, study hard and be polite and grateful. We all watched Desmond's on TV, because the immigrant story of a Guyanese family living above a barbershop in south London reflected my mum and dad's story - moving from Aden and Kenya to England - more than anyother programme. It was the archetypal immigrant story: come here, make money, go home and live large.

In one episode, Desmond is in hospital and Porkpie and Shirley are talking. Shirley talks about how "none of us expected to die here", explaining that she and Desmond came to the UK for financial reasons, but the plan was always to go home to Guyana to die. Now, with British children and a life in the UK, she feels that dream has died.

I remember my mum expressing a similar desire, to die in India (though she had never lived there), because it was the country of her heritage and near her sisters. That immigrant's feeling of being temporary resonated with her. And here I was, a funny kind of Englishman who had emerged from two histories - yes, I failed Norman Tebbit's cricket test in 1990 by supporting India to a crushing defeat against England, but I felt British, a Londoner and Desi all at the same time ... an "almost".

The other thing we did as a family (minus Dad) was go to the library together. I was a voracious reader, of Star Trek tie-in novels, thrillers, comics. I loved books where kids were wronged and learned to fight back, books featuring cops on the edge, demon headmasters, mice with swords defending monasteries. I rarely saw myself represented in these books - not that I knew that was an issue at the time.

Recently, I was asked at a panel discussion to tell the chair about a time I thought I was white - a preposterous question. But at the same time, in the stories I read and wrote as a child, the characters were all mostly white. They didn't look like me. Junot Díaz once said: "There's this idea that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. And what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror. It's that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves."

Kureishi's 'almost' got me. Finally, I didn't have to be one or the other, I could be in-between

So at the library, when I saw the name of the author, Hanif Kureishi, I was taken aback. It was a brown person's name. It felt alien to me to see a familiar name on the cover of a book. Wasn't Mr Kureishi the name of that guy with the Datsun who drove around north-west London in the 80s, renting out pirated Bollywood VHS tapes to south Asian families from the back? Kureishi felt like family. I opened the book, scanned the opening lines there and then, saw that "almost" ... I can remember the feeling as I read that word, wrapping itself around me like the orange shawl my ba's swami used to balance on his shoulders. It made me feel less alone.

It was 1993 and I felt like a funny kind of Englishman. I was trying to figure myself out. At home, I found myself speaking Gujarati less and less. The group of Asian kids I hung around with at school was affectionately referred to as "the Paki posse" by our white counterparts. I was discovering rap and bhangra and, if I was not working with my parents in their warehouse, the odd daytime rave at weekends. Always overhead was that heavy imperative: work hard and take over the family business.

Kureishi's "almost" got me. Finally, an acknowledged duality, a nuanced fluidity, a spectrum. I didn't have to be one or the other, I could be in-between. I could be almost.

After The Buddha of Suburbia, I diligently scanned the spines of every single volume in the adult section of the library, looking for other south Asian names. That book had changed my life: it said everything I felt, saw things through a lens I recognised, made me feel less like a weirdo.

It also unlocked something in my reading. Though I didn't find another south Asian name for a while, I found myself tearing through Crime and Punishment, Middlemarch, Brave New World, Adrian Mole. Instead of movie and TV tie-ins, I was reading the world. I was heading through time and space, through country and county. I learned about myself, other people, different cultures, my own culture. The library made me a citizen of everywhere.

The same thing is currently happening to my daughter. She's two and one of the highlights of her week is a trip to the library. She chooses books herself, revels at finding ones with brown children in them because they look like her. She repeatedly wants the same ones. I am sick of Dogger at this point.

The books we choose for her are curated to make her feel included and to ensure positive representations of people from as many diverse backgrounds as possible. I search hard for books featuring black and brown characters, animals with foreign names, people with disabilities, non-traditional families. I do the work to ensure that her bookshelves are aspirational, so they present a world that she wants to belong to, that validates her experience. When she sees herself in books - as a main character, not a sidekick - doing normal things like going to the bakery, the greengrocer's, buying flowers for mummy, her actual experience is normalised. She isn't other. She simply is.

In White Teeth, Zadie Smith writes: "There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection." Books are mirrors, and I found my reflection in The Buddha of Suburbia. That one act of representation was enough to show me that I belonged. My daughter has found her reflection in Fun at the Shops, where a brown kid and her dad do the big shop. Books can be powerful tools for our aspirations and books that reflect the society we want to be in, that show the multitudinousness and multiculturalism of the UK, they make us citizens of everywhere. I became a citizen the moment I found The Buddha of Suburbia. Thanks to a library, I am "almost", and that is enough for me.

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How The Buddha of Suburbia let me in to a wider world | Nikesh Shukla

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I recognised Hanif Kureishi's depiction of a young man's uncertain cultural identity immediately, and it began to show me how to be at home everywhere

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Le mouvement punk est-il précurseur de la transition écologique ?

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Le mouvement punk est-il précurseur de la transition écologique ?

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La contre-culture punk, et notamment anarcho-punk a eu sur le véganisme, la permaculture, La Défense des animaux et de la nature, une influence décisive.

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Hollywood productions (and English language films in general) have to go a long way in terms of representation of identities like the so-called 'brown identity'. While brown-skinned characters from India and its neighbors have been featured in English films for a long time, they often fall prey to stereotypes or appropriation. Even though portraying an Indian character and their struggles might seem like 'Oscar bait', some of the elements in these stories hardly feel relatable to local Indians as well as the Indian-American diaspora.

Actors and filmmakers like Aziz Ansari, Gurinder Chadha, Hasan Minhaj, and Dev Patel are changing the perspective to an extent, portraying characters and writing stories beyond the 'curry-eating', 'mystical and exotic' narratives. Otherwise, with popular shows and movies, some stereotypes can, unfortunately, be formed in the heads of non-Indian viewers.

Cows, Dirty Roads And A Lack Of Infrastructure

More often that not, Hollywood tends to juxtapose the beauty of the West with the "dirty" East. Shots of a sterile white country cut to filth, pollution, dusty slums, and bad roads in India, which is not accurate at all. The biggest metros of India are highly modernized, with expressways, skyscrapers, and the like, but this is rarely depicted in the movies.

RELATED: 9 Best Twitter Reactions and Memes To Indian Matchmaking Season 2For some reason, cows are always part of these visuals. One would be surprised to visit the country and see that cows are mostly found in pastoral lands and rarely in an urban setting. Slumdog Millionaire is the biggest offender.

Everybody Does Not Work In Call Centers Or Medicine

Indians also tend to be boxed into the professions that they can be shown in on the big screen. Whether it was the influence of Outsourced or other external stereotypes, constantly depicting Indians as call center workers just doesn't work anymore. Still, shows like make whole episodes about it (like "Road to India," for example).

Similarly, the second profession that is assigned to the brown man or woman is that of a doctor. As a people, Indians are very intelligent, but they do excel in several other fields too, which is obvious from the Indian actors excelling in Hollywood itself.

Inaccurate Clothing

Every single time an Indian appears on-screen, in India, they are adorned in elaborate saris and heavy jewelry. This was even seen in Never Have I Ever when Nalini visited Chennai, despite the fact that the show aims to undo these kinds of stereotypes. Weighty gold jewels and silk saris are reserved for weddings and festivals, and most Indians dress in casual western wear like jeans, blouses, and dresses at most times.

Netflix's romantic comedy Wedding Season actually provided an accurate picture of wedding wear too, which was not gaudy and outdated like most other brown-depicting movies.

The Shy/ Nerdy Character

A prerequisite to being an Indian character seems to be awkwardness, which is the gross generalization of an entire population. Everyone in the country is not a Raj Koothrapalli or Jamal Malik - there are Kumars and Tom Haverfords (with his brilliant ideas) too who have more to their personality.

Assigning Indians the role of the nerd is a thinly veiled way to sideline a brown character, and Indians would like to be seen in leading roles which do not reinforce this cookie-cutter stereotype onto them.

The Tour Guide For White People

Another banal trope role which is handed to Indians is that of the token tour guide to a fascinated white character visiting the country. This guide also doubles as a spiritual guru for said character, often showing them how India can cleanse them.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel typecast Dev Patel into this role, and this character archetype has been handed out to many brown actors, often not even named, in several "feel-good" movies.

Hinduism Isn't The Only Religion In India

In many depictions, Indians are equated to Hinduism. Surely, Hinduism is a major religion in the country, but its diverse landscape also harbors Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, and other faiths. Hence, showing all American-Indians as worshipers of the idols of Hindu gods and goddesses, complete with Hindu-style offerings and incense sticks, is just generalizing Indians under one category.

Further, even with the Hindu Indians, not all of them are intensely devout believers. Just like the generic and dominant American Christian characters in popular media, some might be of stronger faith while some might hardly worship their deities at all.

Tacky Accents

It has been automatically assumed that all Indian accents are more than often funny-sounding and grammatically incorrect. The root cause of this was racial ignorance and the earlier depictions of Indians by white actors (wearing brownface) like Peter Sellers in The Party and Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.

Of course, the stereotypical 'Indian accent' reached disastrous heights with the character Apu in The Simpsons. Apu was so offensive to the diaspora that even a documentary called The Problem With Apu was released in 2017, dissecting the stereotypes and racial micro-aggressions the character presented. Actor Kal Penn even revealed on Twitter how some studios wanted him to have an 'authentic Apu accent' in his roles! Recently, Apu's voice actor Hank Azaria apologized on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and stepped down from the role.

Romanticizing Poverty

India has a concerning rate of social inequality and poverty. Some films like Lion have tried showing a financially-troubled protagonist in a realistic and empathetic light. But otherwise, foreign films often tend to romanticize poverty (or show 'poverty porn' as some might say) or paint the entirety of India as a backward nation with no modern infrastructure. The Darjeeling Limited, Million Dollar Arm, and many others mock and generalize Indian cities as having nothing but shoddy shacks of buildings and half-naked children.

Indian directors frame their scenes in the backdrops of ruined buildings, crowded streets, and cows in the middle of traffic, but they paint the context as being from a particular area in India rather than generalizing the entire country as an undeveloped urban jungle.

The White Savior Narrative

Movies that deal with the interaction of foreign and Indian characters evoke pity and sympathy, but maybe they can do better with a more empathetic portrayal rather than a sympathetic one. Lion and Million Dollar Arm both depict white characters changing the fates of poor Indians. Both are based on true stories and do justice to their source material to an extent.

However, Indian representation should also involve portrayals of independent characters who can make it on their own, rather than depending on white people all the time. Colonial cultural hegemony is unfortunately still engrained in India after two centuries of British rule. 'Fair skin' is still glorified even in Indian communities, with fairness being equated to a very desirable quality. Hence, bolder Indian lead characters are needed not just to fight the generic white savior narrative, but the racist biases that some Indians themselves internalize in their thoughts.

Bollywood Isn't The Only Indian Film Industry

Bollywood and Hollywood may share scenes, but the Hindi film industry is not the only mode of filmmaking. India produces films in the rest of its languages too, with some modern gems acquiring critical acclaim at international film festivals as well. These languages range from Assamese to Malayalam to Bengali, and so on. Further, not every Indian film is riddled with Bollywood clichés like musical numbers, grandiose sets, and gestures of romance.

Scenes like the final dance to Jai Ho in Slumdog Millionaire and the wedding scene in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel reinforce the notions that Indian celebrations mostly involve grand, choreographed songs and dances like a typical Bollywood film.

Exoticism and Mysticism

Cults like those in Indiana Jones & The Temple Of Doom, and the spiritual journeys in India as shown in Eat, Pray, Love, paint India as a highly 'exotic' land filled with mysticism and superstitious beliefs.

RELATED: 10 Things From The Indiana Jones Franchise That Haven't Aged Well

The argument against this stereotype can again be explained as the point for India's multi-religious identity. Not all Indians are blind worshipers of bearded mystics and gurus. As of last year, about 2.9 million Indians are atheists (via The Print), while some consider themselves to be rationalists despite holding onto their religious identity. Otherwise, India is a diverse land of its own, rather than an exotic, archaic, and divine fantasy world of sorts.

There's More To Music Than Just Classical

India does boast of historic classical and folk music styles, having exported maestros like sitarist Ravi Shankar to the rest of the world. Still, such forms of music hardly make their way to the Indian music mainstream in today's times. Film music or independent music usually dominates the playlists of many Indian demographics. Many independent artists are experimenting or reinterpreting foreign genres too, be it hip-hop or electronica.

That's why rather than relying on a 'traditional' sound, films shot in India can feature several new-age Indian artists and their musical styles.

Purposely Complicated Or Inaccurate Names

Indians, Arabs, Koreans, and many other immigrants get mocked for their names that are difficult to pronounce by the dominant citizen groups in the countries they settle. Some even have to Anglicize or shorten their names for the convenience of Westerners. Instead of mispronouncing or changing the names of the people from this diaspora, maybe the Hollywood narrative can make an effort to accurately show some Indian names, as it's not always that difficult.

Even though today, foreign productions do try to accurately portray Indian characters and their names, there used to be Indian characters with names complicated and exaggerated beyond measure. The biggest case yet again is Apu's surname, Nahasapeemapetilon. Older films were even more careless in christening their Indian characters. In Annie (1978), an Indian bodyguard was simply named Punjab (an Indian state, hardly ever used as a person's name).

The Cuisine Doesn't Always Make Non-Indians Sick

Indian food might provide a spicier culinary experience to Americans or English people who are not used to the taste. There's an actual term 'Delhi Belly,' referring to the upset stomach that foreign tourists have when they visit India.

RELATED: No Reservations And 9 Other Delicious Movies Where Food Is The Star

Western portrayals have often reduced Indian food as something heavily spicy or gooey that leads to diarrhea. Such tropes are played around with Jon Hamm and Alan Arkin's characters in Million Dollar Arm. Another done-to-death stereotype is referring to Indian gravy dishes as 'curry'. There are so many diverse meat and vegetable-based dishes from all Indian states that it's hard to categorize any particular Indian dish as a curry. A good alternative to such clichés can be The Hundred-Foot Journey which normalizes the cooking habits of Indians.

Supporting Characters For Comic Relief

Indian-Americans were often shown as shop clerks, drivers, doctors, or any other supporting character. Often reduced to caricatures with the aforementioned accents, they were hardly given any scope for character development or background stories.

However, now, with slightly higher representation, this attitude is changing. Examples like Aziz Ansari's lead role in Master of None and Rahul Kohli in The Haunting Of Bly Manor are helping in giving Indian-origin American and British actors a more nuanced and multi-layered portrayal.

NEXT: 5 Of Owen's Funniest Puns (& 5 Most Memorable Quotes) In Haunting Of Bly Manor

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15 Stereotypes Indians Are Tired Of Seeing In Western Movies & TV

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While brown-skinned characters from India and its neighbors have been featured in English films for a long time, they often fall prey to stereotypes.

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t has been in print for less than 20 years, but Hanif Kureishi's debut novel remains an important time capsule for teenage life in 1970s London, confronting racial politics at a time when immigrants were treated as intruders on British soil.

The book's teenage protagonist Karim, a "hybrid" of Asian and English blood, is searching for sex and a sense of belonging in the suburbs. He is torn between wanting acceptance from two camps: white supremacists and alienated immigrants. Meanwhile, his father, the book's most memorable character, is on a similar path, teaching Buddhist discipline to a generation of ageing hippies, while Karim indulges in drugs and mutual masturbation behind closed doors.

As Thatcher's Tory reign approaches, and punk rock explodes onto the underground music scene, Karim finds his place working in the theatre, among other working-class misfits from a range of cultural backgrounds. The plot is hardly labyrinthine and there's no neat resolution, but Kureishi's blunt treatment of race, politics and sexuality is sure to grab the reader's attention as he confronts uncomfortable home truths about British attitudes towards foreigners.

Reissued with a handsome retro cover as part of the Faber Firsts series, The Buddha of Suburbia was awarded the Whitbread Award for best first novel in 1990 and three years later was adapted as a BBC mini-series, soundtracked by David Bowie. It remains a fresh and timely read today as a new generation of teenagers struggle to find their place in another recession.

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The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi

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t has been in print for less than 20 years, but Hanif Kureishi's debut novel remains an important time capsule for teenage life in 1970s London, confronting racial politics at a time when immigrants were treated as intruders on British soil.

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Hanif Kureishi reads the Buddha of Suburbia at the To Hell with Publishing event at Mutate Britain