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As with many first books, this one has taken a while, so perhaps it’s best if I proceed chronologically. First, then, a big thank you to Adrian Rifkin for screening The Lavender Hill Mob as part of his M.A. module “Cities and Film” in 1995. From a small epiphany half an hour later (over a plate of chips and cheese in Leeds University’s Student Union), all else has ultimately followed. I owe a considerable debt to my Ph.D. supervisors at the University of Sussex: Simon Rycroft, Andy Medhurst, and Jon May. Their support, expertise , and readiness to allow me to pursue my hunches allowed this project to take the shape it has. I must also thank a group of remarkable scholars with whom I was fortunate enough to study at Sussex, including Thomas Austin, Matt Bennett, Clare Birchall, Kay Dickinson, Ewan Kirkland, Suzy Gordon, Paul Myerscough, and Bryony Randall. Their careful combination of interdisciplinary irreverence and intellectual rigor provided an excellent laboratory in which to test out and develop the ideas in this book. From this period, I am particularly grateful to four people—Caroline Bassett, Iman Hamam, Michael Lawrence, and Meredith Miller—who not only got me through some wobbly moments but whose astute insights can be found scattered liberally throughout these pages. My Ph.D. was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am also grateful to the staff at the following archives: British Library Newspapers, the Geffrye Museum, the London Transport Museum, the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, the National Archives, and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Archive of Art and Design. Lesley Whitworth and Catherine Moriarty at the University of Brighton’s Design Archives were especially good fun and unfailingly generous with both their expertise and their material. acknowledgments 263 264 acknowledgments I am grateful to my colleagues in what was the School of Cultural Studies and is now the Department of Media, Culture, and Drama at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Not only have they succeeded in creating a stimulating research environment, but their wizardry with rather limited resources enabled me to have more leave for this project than perhaps I rightly deserved. In particular, Michelle Henning, Ben Highmore, and Gillian Swanson deepened both my knowledge of and fascination with the intricacies of British modernity and provided welcome reassurance that the most productive research seminars usually take place over a nice long lunch with a decent bottle of wine. Alan Sinfield, David Pinder, Michael Moon, John David Rhodes, and two anonymous readers for the University of Minnesota Press read this manuscript at different points in its gestation and offered insightful, challenging , and highly productive comments. Jason Weidemann, my editor at Minnesota, has been exemplary; his unstinting enthusiasm for this project from the moment it landed on his desk made this book immeasurably easier to write. Thanks, too, to David Thorstad for his attentive copyediting, and to Denise Carlson for her excellent index. Finally, danke vielmals to James Freeman, my technical adviser and longsu ffering valet, for putting up with all the madness. ...

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