ABSTRACT Using Mark Fisher’s reconfigurations of Derrida’s Hauntology, this article explores the interactions between these narrative features in the works of Catherine O’Flynn and Joel Lane. Fisher reworks hauntology in relation to the distinct features of ‘futuristic’ music and ‘retro’ perceptions of what lay ahead. He links this psychic and cultural trap with ideas of the weird and the eerie. Both O’Flynn and Lane have produced eerie texts set in the off-kilter and marginal West Midlands regions, placing their characters in literal and symbolic haunted sites. Their respective spectres – people, places and cultures – are caught in a perpetual liminality and psychic looping: a hauntological position. These play out through the motifs of melancholic landscapes, personalities and cultural currents, most notably in music. This article interrogates these strange conjugations and interfaces that play out in the fiction of O’Flynn and Lane.

ABSTRACT Robert de Ferrers III, the sixth earl of Derby, is generally considered an outlier in the events of the civil war in England between 1264 and 1266. His involvement in the rebellion centred on Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, has been widely interpreted as driven by self-interest and aggrandisement, defined by unorthodox levels of violence and lawlessness. This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of Robert’s involvement in the rebellion across the Midlands in 1264, and places the surviving evidence within its wider contexts. In doing so, it shows that Ferrers’ activities during 1264 were much more aligned with the baronial faction’s strategic interests than is generally understood, and his behaviour was far from unorthodox. Through this analysis, the paper also illuminates how the chronicler William Rishanger’s influence among modern historians is due a correction.

ABSTRACT The strong military traditions of Worcester may mean the city’s engagement in two world wars is often thought about in terms of the soldiers or even the ammunition produced at Blackpole Munitions Works. The ways in which both wars impacted the more mundane lives of the majority of women who were housewives have received less attention. As housewives, daughters, sisters or domestic servants, women undertook the lion’s share of the domestic and emotional labours needed to maintain homes, communities and neighbourhoods. This was played out at a local level, shaped by the geographical, economic and cultural specificity of not only regions but towns and cities. There were as many different home fronts as there were battle fronts; thus, Worcester residents experienced the privations and problems of twentieth-century large-scale international warfare, through their local home front. This contextualized case study of Worcester explores the financial challenges housewives faced, their problems with food provisioning and the care of evacuees to argue that both wars entered the home in a multitude of ways. It provides evidence of how, the boundary between public and private spheres was blurred, as in wartime the state interfered in the domestic life to an unprecedented degree.

ABSTRACT This article explores women’s experiences of local government in Worcester between 1907 and 1939. The city saw a limited suffrage movement, and to date has never elected a female MP. Yet while women in Worcester arguably played little role in ‘national’ politics, they were active in local government, first through wartime local authority committees, and then, in the interwar years, when seeking election as Labour, Liberal, Conservative or Independent candidates, with Conservative women being most successful. Drawing on city council records and local newspaper reporting, the article considers the ways in which women made an impact on Worcester’s government, particularly as elected councillors. Some women were also involved with more ceremonial – and consequently more visible – roles in local government, though these were generally the preserve of elite women. As such, the article contributes to wider debates about the changing nature of women’s political activism post-enfranchisement.

King James I added his seal to a royal charter that incorporated the city of Worcester

"The March of Ewyas. The Story of Longtown Castle and the de Lacy Dynasty." Midland History, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2