What was it like to live in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century? In a successor to his acclaimed Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self, James Hinton uses autobiographical writing contributed to Mass Observation since 1981 to explore the social and cultural history of late twentieth-century Britain. Prompted by thrice-yearly open-ended questionnaires, Mass Observation's volunteers wrote about their political attitudes, religious beliefs, work, childhoods, education, friendships, marriages, sex lives, mid-life crises, aging - the whole range of human emotion, feeling, attitudes, and experience. At the core of the book are seven 'biographical essays': intimate portraits of individual lives set in the context of the shift towards the more tolerant and permissive society of the 1960s and the rise of Thatcherite neo-liberalism as the structures of Britain's post-war settlement crumbled from the later 1970s. The mass observers featured in the book, four women and three men, are drawn from across the social spectrum - wife of a small businessman, teacher, social worker, RAF wife, mechanic, lorry driver, City banker: all active and forceful characters with strong opinions and lives crowded with struggle and drama. The honesty and frankness with which they wrote about themselves takes us below the surface of public life to the efforts of 'ordinary', but exceptionally articulate and self-reflective, people to make sense of their lives in rapidly changing times.

What was it like to live in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century? In a successor to his acclaimed Nine Wartime Lives: Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self, James Hinton uses autobiographical writing contributed to Mass Observation up to 1981 to explore the social and cultural history of late twentieth-century Britain. Prompted by thrice-yearly open-ended questionnaires, Mass Observation's volunteers wrote about their political attitudes, religious beliefs, work, childhoods, education, friendships, marriages, sex lives, mid-life crises, aging - the whole range of human emotion, feeling, attitudes, and experience. At the core of the book are seven 'biographical essays': intimate portraits of individual lives set in the context of the shift towards the more tolerant and permissive society of the 1960s to the rise of Thatcherite neo-liberalism as the structures of Britain's post-war settlement crumbled from the later 1970s. The mass observers featured in the book, four women and three men, are drawn from across the social spectrum - wife of a small businessman, teacher, social worker, RAF wife, mechanic, lorry driver, City banker: all active and forceful characters with strong opinions and lives crowded with struggle and drama. The honesty and frankness with which they wrote about themselves takes us below the surface of public life to the efforts of 'ordinary', but exceptionally articulate and self-reflective, people to make sense of their lives in rapidly changing times.

The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation embraces new approaches and themes that highlight Mass Observation's long history as an innovative research organization, a social movement, and an archival project. Spanning the period from Mass Observation's inception to the present day, essay authors discuss a wide range of topics including anthropology, history, popular politics, cultural studies, literature, selfhood, emotion, art and visual studies. Indeed, what emerges across this volume is confirmation that engagement with Mass Observation-whether its historical materials or those produced in the last decade-is crucial to understanding the vast array of experiences that make up British life.

James Hinton uses the Mass Observation project to explore how seven people - the wife of a small businessman, a teacher, a social worker, an RAF wife, a mechanic, a lorry driver, and a City banker - reacted to the rapidly changing society after the war years, through the increasingly tolerant sixties, to the rise of Thatcherite neo-liberalism.

This book analyses leisure choice as a complex concept, made more complicated in later life than at any other time. The author posits that there are many unanswered questions about the new booming generation of healthy, older people, and this book asks what it is really like to be old at the beginning of the 21st century in the United Kingdom, analysing leisure in older people in the context of the subtle politics of the day to day. Throughout the chapters, the author highlights the often missing depictions of older people who enjoy and enact bold, informed agency as part of their everyday lives. Drawing upon secondary data from the Mass Observation Archive, a social thesis of leisure and ageing emerges that challenges the individualism inherent in ‘active ageing.’ It is proposed that the idea of ‘active ageing’ creates complex constraints to leisure as people strive to measure up to cultural expectations. The stories in this book advocate for an appreciation and re-evaluation of passive leisure in later life, and the enjoyment and freedom it can bring. The project is therefore useful to students and researchers of leisure studies, gerontology and sociology of ageing.

First published in 1995. This book provides the only feminist overview of the development of both the mainstream and the feminist variant of the survey as a means of investigating sexual attitude and behaviour. Illuminating reading for the general reader, essential for students on Sexuality, Methodology, Women’s Studies a d British Modern Social History courses and key text for all Sociologists.

Mass Observation was founded in 1937 with the aim of researching the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. One of its best-loved publications is The Pub and the People (1943), a unique study of one of Britain's best-loved pastimes, describing how people behaved in pubs, what and how much they drank, and the decor and layout of the average pre-war alehouse. Alongside sociological interest it offers amusing insights into an era when supping pints was only for the roughest customers, and beer was considered helpful not only to general health ('There is no bad ale, so Grandma said') but also (contra the porter in Macbeth) to the act of love. 'The authors of this book have unearthed much curious information.' George Orwell, Listener 'Anyone with an interest in the history of beer and pubs in Britain ought to read it.' Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog

What do people believe about death and the afterlife? How do they negotiate the relationship between science and religion? How do they understand apparently paranormal events? What do they make of sensations of awe, wonder or exceptional moments of sudden enlightenment? The volunteer mass observers responded to such questions with a freshness, openness and honesty which compels attention. Using this rich material, Mass Observers Making Meaning captures the extraordinarily diverse landscape of belief and disbelief to be found in Britain in the late 20th-century, at a time when Christianity was in steep decline, alternative spiritualities were flourishing and atheism was growing. Divided as they were about the ultimate nature of reality, the mass observers were united in their readiness to puzzle about life's larger questions. Listening empathetically to their accounts, James Hinton – himself a convinced atheist – seeks to bring divergent ways of finding meaning in human life into dialogue with one another, and argues that we can move beyond the cacophony of conflicting beliefs to an understanding of our common need and ability to seek meaning in our lives.

Mass Observation was founded by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings in 1937. Its purpose was to create 'an anthropology of ourselves' in other words, to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. Discounting an initial pamphlet, this was the first book to be published. It appears in Faber Finds as a part of an extensive reissue programme of the original Mass Observation titles. May the Twelfth is a portrait of life on a single day, the day of the Coronation of George V1 in 1937. Compiled from the individual reports of hundreds of people, the Mass Observers, from all walks of life, it vividly recreates the atmosphere and excitement of a great national occasion. When first published it received a long review from Evelyn Waugh in the short-lived Night and Day. One might have imagined it wouldn't have been to his taste but he was won round. Having congratulated Faber on the price of 12s 6d he goes on to say, '. . . it would be hard to find any recent work of the same length which had so little that was dull and so much that was highly amusing.' He especially praises the London section, 'The succeeding section on London's May 12 could scarcely be better. It provides a real documentary survey of the event as seen by the crowds.'

A fly-on-the-wall account of the smart and strange subcultures that make, trade, curate, collect, and hype contemporary art. The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.