A play on the recent past: History, writing, and Stanley Middleton’s novels

This unusual new book by a distinguished historian highlights the pivotal question of how history is written.

A Play on the Recent Past is a novel history, about the many ways there are of writing about everyday life in the past.

In his 45 novels the Booker Prize winner Stanley Middleton wrote a history of daily living in Nottingham (he named the city Beechnall’) in the second half of the 20th century. He wrote about a visual world, about violence, dialect, language and politics; above all he wrote about things. All these things and all the historians in his novels are historical gauges, placing action and people in certain historical settings.

This book reveals Middleton himself as a historian. You may come to see him as the historian’, a figure his writing embodies. And perhaps you will become as interested as Middleton was with finding ways to place his characters and the lives they lived within particular historical bounds. Perhaps you too will have become as intrigued as Carolyn Steedman with just how telling the make of a vacuum cleaner is in his writing, or what a piece of toast and Marmite, or a jug kettle, a central heating system, or a beige pullover has to say about the social world and the histories that get written about it.