Environmental advocacy and European politics: The instrumental work of Ken Coates
December 9, 2025
This is a guest blog by Claire Crompton, a Geography undergraduate student undertaking a placement with Manuscripts and Special Collections, with a response from Tony Simpson, former assistant to Ken Coates MEP. Claire Crompton: During my placement with the Manuscripts and Special Collections team, I worked on the local environmental files of Ken Coates. Coates …
Death of the Author: Newspapers in the French Revolution
October 20, 2025
Did you know that Manuscripts and Special Collections holds a collection of over 3500 printed works relating to the French Revolution? While there are a range of dates covered by the material, pamphlets from the revolutionary period itself are particularly well represented. These publications can give us valuable insights into the unfolding of the revolution: …
Manuscripts and Special… Experiences!
March 25, 2025
This is a guest post by Hannah Gregg, second year Classics and Archaeology student at the University of Nottingham, who recently completed a placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections. My expectations… Like going into any new environment, I was extremely apprehensive before starting, especially as I’d never had experience in the archives before. Moreover, my …
Feminist Footnotes
August 9, 2024
This is a guest post by Chiara Rebora, a University of Nottingham student, who recently completed a Summer Research Placement at Manuscripts and Special Collections. Expectations of my role? When I began this placement, I felt under-qualified and completely out of my comfort zone. I had to remind myself I was selected for this placement …
Politics Gets Personal
January 25, 2024
Diaries can make exceptionally rewarding reading: they are intensely subjective, inward-looking narratives, and yet can also provide a window onto times gone by, capturing everyday experiences and sudden cataclysms alike. This duality is perhaps captured nowhere so well as in the Diaries of the 4th Duke of Newcastle, which date between 1822 and 1850, and …
Adult Education and Workers’ Control
February 22, 2023
This is a guest post by Tony Simpson, from the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Spokesman Books. The ‘Knowledge is Power’ exhibition at Weston Gallery celebrates the University of Nottingham’s Adult Education Department. In the wake of the First World War, the Ministry of Reconstruction established a special committee which, in its final report in …
Colonialism in Correspondence: The Letters of Lord William Bentinck
January 26, 2022
This is a guest post by English student Ben, written as part of his placement with the Nottingham Advantage Award from the UoN Careers and Employability Service. The letters of Lord William Bentinck, from the Portland Collection at the University of Nottingham, contain many details of the governorship of India in the early 19th century. …
Putting it in Perspective
March 4, 2020
Guest post by Chloé Havez (3rd year Politics & International Relations undergraduate student) The title of a 1992 newspaper clipping on Coates’ criticism of the European Parliament quarrelling over where the European Environment Agency should have been built during the alarmist trend of ozone depletion is of unfortunate relevance today thirty years on, and could …
Georgian Delights
January 6, 2020
When King George IV died in June 1830, The Times asked, ‘What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?’. George was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime (1762-1830). As Prince of Wales, after 1783, George became notorious for his frequent love affairs and lavish self-indulgence, spending wildly on …
Women’s Suffrage in the D H Lawrence Collection
July 18, 2018
One hundred years after the ‘Representation of the People Act’, which awarded the vote to women over the age of 30 who owned property, it seems like a good time to rediscover some gems from the archives that provide intimate snapshots of the fight for the vote. Louisa ‘Louie’ Burrows, a friend and onetime fiancée …
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