Susan Pedersen teaches at Columbia. Her new book, Burn This Letter: Lady Frances, Lady Betty and the Marriage of Four, will be published in May 2026.
Most of the signs at the Women’s March on Washington on 21 January were hand-lettered, idiosyncratic, fierce, personal and often very funny. Hats off to the folks who thought up ‘Hell Toupée’, or the junior doctor type carrying a clinical description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or the bearer of the Magritte pipe with Trump’s face superimposed...
At the moment of its American birth, ‘international relations meant race relations.’ Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’ – not class conflict or interstate conflict – was the spectre preying on scholars’ minds. The field of international relations was born to avert that disaster. A blunter way to put this is that international relations was supposed to figure out how to preserve white supremacy.
In the explosion of recent books about the First World War – many of them excellent, almost all packed with narrative excitement, but not all breaking new ground – Isabel Hull’s stands out. There is no human interest, no lice and dysentery, but it is as gripping and important as any. It is concerned not with the experience of war but with legal arguments over its...
On 1 July 1916, Sergeant R.H. Tawney led his platoon over the top on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme, holding a gun to one young man’s head to get him to stop crying and keep going. Almost immediately afterwards, Tawney himself was shot through the chest and abdomen and lay for 24 hours in no-man’s-land before being rescued. Although he lived with pain for the rest...
Among left-leaning right-thinking Britons of a certain age, Shirley Williams is the embodiment of lost hopes and lost opportunities, a living reminder of a more harmonious Britain that might have been, if … If what? If the times had been less polarising, the parties less bloody-minded, the principal herself more adept? Facing up to that question Williams concluded that she lacked not only the ruthlessness needed to make it to the top but also the boundless self-confidence and (for much of her career) the supportive spouse that a woman in a man’s world needs.
Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey.
Susan Pedersen on the birth of ‘International Relations’.
I have often thought of writing a history of own goals. It would try to identify the factors common to the great boomerangs of the past: the conceit that mistakes itself for cunning, the...
When Susan Pedersen writes that Eleanor Rathbone was the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century she might have added that another Somerville alumna,...
In the Seventies and Eighties, right-wing think-tanks and their academic lapdogs put about the idea that the ills of contemporary Britain were fundamentally due to its genteel aversion to...
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