PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Journal: Yale University Press eBooks
Year: 2020

Conference in London in the summer of 2010. I was meeting with her to discuss the publication of my then current project, on country houses and their relationship to the British Empire. That project did not fit Yale's roster of titles (it soon found a home at Manchester University Press), but in the course of our conversation I mentioned a long-standing but as yet ill-defined idea I had to explore the reasons for the prevalence of heroic failure in British culture. I first encountered heroic fai