A compelling history of the famous London club and its members’ impact on Britain’s scientific, creative, and official life When it was founded in 1824, the Athenæum broke the mold. Unlike in other preeminent clubs, its members were chosen on the basis of their achievements rather than on their background or political affiliation. Public rather than private life dominated the agenda. The club, with its tradition of hospitality to conflicting views, has attracted leading scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout its history, including Charles Darwin and Matthew Arnold, Edward Burne-Jones and Yehudi Menuhin, Winston Churchill and Gore Vidal. This book is not presented in the traditional, insular style of club histories, but devotes attention to the influence of Athenians on the scientific, creative, and official life of the nation. From the unwitting recruitment of a Cold War spy to the welcome admittance of women, this lively and original account explores the corridors and characters of the club; its wider political, intellectual, and cultural influence; and its recent reinvention.

Over the course of his professional life, John Maynard Keynes altered his views from free trade in the classical tradition to restricted foreign trade, and ultimately, at the end of his career, back to his original position. There is no general agreement among economists as to whether Keynes ended his career in the camp of the free traders or aligned himself with the protectionists. John Maynard Keynes: Free Trader or Protectionist? seeks an answer to this question by analyzing Keynes’ own views on this issue, as stated in his major publications, letters, speeches, testimony before government bodies, newspaper articles, participation in conferences, and other sources. Through this detailed review of what Keynes himself had to say on the issue as opposed to what others have alleged, this book strives to make a significant contribution to the resolution of this issue.

How did nineteenth-century women's poetry shift from the poetess poetry of lyric effusion and hyper-femininity to the muscular epic of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh? Networking the Nation re-writes women's poetic traditions by demonstrating the debt that Barrett Browning's revolutionary poetics owed to a circle of American and British women poets living in Florence and campaigning in their poetry and in their salons for Italian Unification. These women poets--Isa Blagden, Elizabeth Kinney, Eliza Ogilvy, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope--formed with Barrett Browning a network of poetry, sociability, and politics, which was devoted to the mission of campaigning for Italy as an independent nation state. In their poetic experiments with the active lyric voice, in their forging of a transnational persona through the periodical press, in their salons and spiritualist seances, the women poets formed a network that attempted to assert and perform an independent unified Italy in their work. Networking the Nation maps the careers of these expatriate women poets who were based in Florence in the key years of Risorgimento politics, racing their transnational social and print communities, and the problematic but schismatic shift in their poetry from the conventional sphere of the poetess. In the fraught and thrilling engagement with their adopted nation's revolutionary turmoil, and in their experiments with different types of writing agency, the women poets in this book offer revolutions of other kinds: revolutions of women's poetry and the very act of writing.