Reading List
Adam Foulds
Novelist and Poet
Adam Foulds is a British novelist and poet. He read English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and took an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.
His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, appeared in 2007. The Broken Word (2008), a narrative poem critics called a verse novella, follows a young Englishman drawn into the violence of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. The Quickening Maze (2009), set in the Victorian asylum where the poet John Clare and Tennyson’s brother Septimus were confined, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In the Wolf’s Mouth (2014) and Dream Sequence (2019) followed.
Granta named him one of the best young British novelists in 2013. He lives in Toronto.
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
by Piers Brendon
“The book is also good on the fact that the Empire for British society as a whole was a minority pursuit. It was a very big part of British culture, but not that many British people were involved in it directly. All the time, right from the beginning, there were large sections of the British population who didn’t think it was a good idea and had no interest in it.” — via Interview, February 2010
Mau Mau and the Kikuyu
by L S B Leakey
“He was a Christian and very much a believer, but also a doctrinaire Darwinist. What’s interesting about his take on the Mau Mau uprising and what it did to the Kikuyu people is that, despite his integration and his knowledge of them, he doesn’t at all describe the kinds of systematic social deprivation that colonial settlers produced for the Kikuyu.” — via Interview, February 2010
Histories of the Hanged
by David Anderson
“David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged is a very good detailed historical overview of the Mau Mau uprising. It’s a military history as well as a social history of the conflict. Its name comes from the fact that central to it is his writing about the kangaroo courts that were set up in Kenya, which were possibly no less valid than the military tribunals going on in America.” — via Interview, February 2010
Britain’s Gulag
The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya
by Caroline Elkins
“In her final chapter she writes directly about its suppression and about the afterlife of the conflict, and the fact that there was no official parliamentary inquiry – so there was no real self-examination at the time on the part of the British. It also seems to be the case that a large amount of significant documents pertaining to the camp system that were in the Commonwealth Office were deliberately destroyed.” — via Interview, February 2010
Ornamentalism
by David Cannadine
“Part of Cannadine’s argument is that there was much more cultural interpenetration in the British Empire, certainly in India, than Said suggests. But also its central contention is that the British Empire wanted to see in other cultures a replication of its own power structure, and of its own aristocracy and royalty, and wanted to weld them into the British Empire.” — via Interview, February 2010