Examines the ways in which the 'Left Behind' have been used to symbolize and foment social divisions in contemporary Britain.

'The Left Behind' is a defining motif of contemporary British political discourse. It is the thread that knits together the 2016 Brexit referendum, the crumbling of the fabled 'Red Wall' in the North, and the pernicious culture war being waged today. But who are the Left Behind?

James Morrison goes in search of the reality behind the rhetoric, offering the first comprehensive, historical analysis of the origins, uses and meanings of the term. He interrogates the popular archetype of the Left Behind - as a working-class, Leave-voting white male from a former industrial heartland - and situates the concept in the context of longstanding, demonizing discourses aimed at communities seen as backward and 'undeserving'.

Analyzing national newspaper coverage and parliamentary discussions, and drawing on interviews with MPs, community leaders, charities, and people with direct lived experiences of poverty and precarity, The Left Behind grapples with the real human cost of austerity for neglected post-industrial communities and other marginalized groups across the world, and the stigmatizing discourse that does little to serve them.

In November 1919, newspapers around the world alerted readers to a sensational new theory of the universe: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Coming at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, Einstein’s theory quickly became a rich cultural resource with many uses beyond physical theory. Media coverage of relativity in Britain took on qualities of pastiche and parody, as serious attempts to evaluate Einstein’s theory jostled with jokes and satires linking relativity to everything from railway budgets to religion. The image of a befuddled newspaper reader attempting to explain Einstein’s theory to his companions became a set piece in the popular press.

           

Loving Faster than Light focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s. Blending literary analysis with insights from the history of science, Katy Price reveals how cultural meanings for Einstein’s relativity were negotiated in newspapers with differing political agendas, popular science magazines, pulp fiction adventure and romance stories, detective plots, and esoteric love poetry. Loving Faster than Light is an essential read for anyone interested in popular science, the intersection of science and literature, and the social and cultural history of physics.