Angus Calder

A socialist and Scottish nationalist, he was a prominent Scottish public intellectual during the 1970s and 1980s.

Angus Calder studied at University of Sussex and King's College. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with The Open University, University of Zimbabwe and University of Malawi. Distinctions recorded are John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and Eric Gregory Award.

• Honorific Prefix — The Honourable • Name — Angus Calder • Birth Name — Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder • Birthplace — London, England • Died — 5 June 2008 • Place of death — Edinburgh, Scotland • Education — King's College, Cambridge University of Sussex • Occupation — Academic • Parents — Peter Ritchie Calder Mabel Jane Forbes McKail • Relatives — Nigel Calder (brother) Simon Calder (nephew)

Angus Calder was born in London on 5 February 1942 into a prominent left-wing family from Scotland. His father was Ritchie Calder (1906–1982), a noted socialist and pacifist who became famous for his work as a journalist and science writer. His siblings are Nigel Calder, mathematician Allan Calder, educationist Isla Calder (1946–2000) and teacher Fiona Rudd (née Calder). His nephew is travel writer and journalist Simon Calder. Calder attended Wallington County Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature. He gained a doctorate from the University of Sussex in 1968 on politics in the United Kingdom during World War II, entitled "The Common Wealth Party, 1942–45" which studied the political party of the same name. At the time, academic research into the conflict was rare as government papers were not available under the fifty-year rule. As a result, Calder worked closely with Paul Addison, another historian with similar research interests. Together Addison and Calder made extensive use of the newly discovered archives of Mass-Observation to examine British public opinion. Calder was instrumental in creating the Mass-Observation Archive at Sussex in 1970, in collaboration with Asa Briggs.

Calder had been commissioned to write a general history of the British Home Front by the publisher Jonathan Cape while still working on his PhD thesis. This led to The People's War, first published in 1969. The work was academic in tone and ranged widely across the political and social history of the period. It was critical of enduring propaganda myths without being polemic, and was extremely successful. It has subsequently been described as "groundbreaking". As Addison summarised: The People's War was well received and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, a literary award. Though its thesis was not widely adopted in academia, it proved extremely influential as popular history. Richard Eyre said that he "could name about twenty works, films, television and theatre which have emerged essentially from Angus Calder's book". Among those who were said to have been influenced by the work were the playwright David Hare and future prime minister Gordon Brown. It remains in print. Calder increasingly began to doubt his own thesis over the following decades. Many of his original conclusions were revised in his The Myth of the Blitz (1991). According to Addison, this reassessment was encouraged by Calder's revulsion with the jingoistic nationalism which accompanied the Falklands War of 1982 and Thatcherism. Both were partly inspired by the collective memory of the "People's War" which Calder had himself popularised.

A nationalist and socialist, he moved from the Scottish National Party (SNP) to the Scottish Socialist Party, and though he cherished the Scottish republican spirit, he sought to challenge some of the popular myths surrounding the country's sense of national identity. In Revolving Culture: Notes from a Scottish republic (1992) he described the development, during the early stages of the Union with England, of an "intellectual republic" forged by a combination of insularity and lack of English interest in Scottish affairs. In 1997 he edited Time to Kill – the Soldier's Experience of War in the West 1939–1945 with Paul Addison; Scotlands of the Mind (2002); Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation (2004); and Gods, Mongrels and Demons: 101 Brief but Essential Lives (2004), a collection of potted biographies of "creatures who have extended my sense of the potentialities, both comic and tragic, of human nature". He had always published verse and won a Gregory Award for his poetry in 1967. Questions of Scottish national identity assumed growing importance in the 1980s, and Calder became active in the debate. A distinctive "Scottish social ethos" informed the activities of prominent Scots in the years of Empire, when they had invested heavily in the concept of Britishness, although he reportedly felt that the Scots had meddled much more overweeningly with the English sense of identity than the English ever did with the Scots. He was delighted to discover that the game of cricket had been introduced to Sri Lanka by a Scot.

His first wife was Jennifer Daiches, daughter of Scottish literary critic David Daiches, with whom Calder collaborated on a book about Sir Walter Scott in 1969. The Calders had two daughters, Rachel and Gowan, and a son, Gideon. His first marriage ended in 1982; he married Kate Kyle in 1986, with whom he had a son, Douglas, born in 1989. Calder took early retirement from the Open University in 1995.

Calder died from lung cancer on 5 June 2008, aged 66. In the closing weeks of his life, the poet Richard Berengarten, together with his son Gideon Calder edited a collection of writing and sketches for and about him, which appeared just after his death.

• The People's War: Britain, 1939–45. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. • Scott, with Jenni Calder. London: Evans, 1969. • Russia Discovered: Nineteenth Century Fiction from Pushkin to Chekhov. London: Heinemann, 1976. • Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981. • T. S. Eliot. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. • Byron. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1987. • The Myth of the Blitz. London: Jonathan Cape, 1991. • Revolving Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. • Scotlands of the Mind. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2002. • Disasters and Heroes: On War, Memory and Representation. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004. • Gods, Mongrels and Demons: 101 Brief but Essential Lives. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.

• Waking in Waikato. Edinburgh: diehard, 1997. • Horace in Tollcross: Eftir some odes of Q. H. Flaccus. Newtyle: Kettilonia, 2000. • Colours of Grief. Nottingham: Shoestring, 2002. • Dipa's Bowl. London: Aark Arts, 2004. • Sun Behind the Castle: Edinburgh Poems. Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2004.

• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. • Faces at the Crossroads ed. Chris Wanjala. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1971. • Old Mortality by Walter Scott. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. • The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence. Ware: Wordsworth, 1999. • The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. Ware: Wordsworth, 1999. • Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001. • The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. • The Thrie Estaitis by David Lindsay, ed. Alan Spence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. • Sugar-Coated Pill: Selected Poems by Mahmood Jamal. Edinburgh: Word Power, 2007.

• Lenman, Bruce (1982), review of Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the 15th Century to the 1780s, in Cencrastus No. 8, Spring 1982, p. 37,

• (Contributor) Pax Edina: The One O' Clock Gun Anthology (Edinburgh, 2010) • Recorded readings and performances • (Collaboration) From Dungeons to the Sky – Commissioned by Amnesty International (Scotland) for performance of 12 poems with music for Commonwealth Head of States visit to Edinburgh, 1996, at the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh. Readings by Angus and Gowan Calder, piano compositions and performance by Dmytro Morykit.

• Britain at War, 1942. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. • (with Andrew Gurr) Writers in East Africa. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1974. • (with Jack Mapanje and Cosmo Pieterse). Summer Fires: New Poetry of Africa. London: Heinemann, 1983. • (with Gabriele Bok) Englische Lyrik 1900–1980. Leipzig: Reclam, 1983. • (with Dorothy Sheridan) Speak for Yourself: A Mass Observation Anthology. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984. • Byron and Scotland: Radical or Dandy?, Edinburgh University Press, 1989,. • (with William Donnelly) Selected Poetry by Robert Burns. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. • (with John M. Mackenzie and Jeanne Cannizzo) David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996. • (with Paul Addison) Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West, 1939–45. London: Pimlico, 1997. • (with Glen Murray and Alan Riach) The Rauchle Tongue: Selected Essays, Journalism and Interviews by Hugh MacDiarmid (3 vols). Manchester: Carcanet, 1997–98. • Wars. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. • Selected Poems by Louis Stevenson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. • (with Beth Junor) The Souls of the Dead are Taking the Best Seats: 50 World Poets on War. Edinburgh: Luath Press, Edinburgh, 2005.