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Nights Out

Life in Cosmopolitan London

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London’s Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: Its old buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theaters. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be "outside" the nation.

Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London's urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area's foreignness and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the 20th century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.

©2012 Judith Walkowitz (P)2013 Audible, Inc. Europe Great Britain Social Sciences England Capitalism Socialism Social justice
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I experienced two major barriers to enjoying this audiobook, but ending up doing so all the same. The first is the narrator's very old fashioned accent, which took some getting used to and which made me laugh now and then with their exaggerated pronunciations. I found listening to it at 1.7x speed helped. The second was the fact that this is an academic title, intended for an academic audience and thus opens and ends with academicese-dense language that is off-putting and pompous. This isn't anti-intellectualism on my part, its just that the book became dull once the 'clever' conceptual stuff was forced onto the subject matter.

However, once my ears got through the concept-heavy introduction, Nights Out picks up. The chapters cover a variety of fascinating periods of the history of London's Soho between about c. 1900 and about c. 1945, and especially those aspects that relate to its status as a cosmopolitan centre. The stories and the details are really rich, delightful and evocative. There are so many different phases and aspects to Soho's history and I ended up enjoying this.

Cultural History of Soho

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