Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrs for the cause newly victorious. They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order. Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstruct history and manipulate memory with the violent context of the French Revolution. Recent work in French cultural history has provided scholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda, from iconography to ritual. Investigations into festival, street literature, rhetoric, reading, audience, and memory have given the revolutionary experience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.

The immediate objective of the young Philip Francis in the series of pseudonymous letters signed Junius and Philo Junius, which were published at intervals in the Public Advertiser between 1769 and 1772 when the author was aged between twenty- nine and thirty-two, was to encompass the downfall of the Grafton administration and, subsequently, the North administration, in anticipation of their replacement by a ministry drawn from the opposition. Grafton went in 1770, but with the opposition falling into disarray, Junius failed to dislodge North and abandoned his campaign. No Junius letters appeared after January 1772. The letters were characterized by vituperative attacks on the personal conduct of ministers and the court. These attacks were accompanied by an acidulous commentary on political events as they unfolded. Ministers were accused of abusing the constitution, as often as not with the complicity of Parliament. Casting himself as a defender of the constitution Junius identified defects in the modus operandi of Parliament and the electoral system without himself bringing forward firm proposals for reform. It was not until he was drawn to comment on propositions advanced by the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights in 1771 that Junius took up a position on parliamentary reform.

Archibald Alison is perhaps more widely remembered from a brief-and disguised—reference in Coningsby than from any direct usage of his own voluminous writings: “Finally, Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby to read the Quarterly Review with great attention; and to make himself master of Mr. Wordy's History of the late War, in twenty volumes, a capital work, which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” The dubbing of Alison as “Mr. Wordy” was one of Disraeli's most unerring shafts. Alison's History of Europe, covering the period 1789-1815, would have earned him that sobriquet on its own, to say nothing of the other books, pamphlets, and articles that flowed from his inexhaustible pen. The various editions of his History, most commonly in sets of twelve volumes, made Alison a quite celebrated historian in his own day. Long neglected in the twentieth century, the History has recently received some critical attention. Without seeking unduly to resurrect a departed reputation, Hedva Ben-Israel does at least acknowledge the History's earlier success: “It was by far the best-selling history of the French Revolution in England and America almost to the end of the century, and was translated into most European and several oriental languages.” Some fruitful comparisons between Alison's work and the more enduring classic by Thomas Carlyle have been drawn by Clare Simmons.

No event of the post-Second World War decade in Britain is recalled as affectionately or enveloped in such an aura of nostalgia as the Festival of Britain, a five-month series of cultural events and exhibits, with its centerpiece at the South Bank in London. But the Festival dear to the recollections of those growing up during and after the war diverged sharply from the original conception of its progenitors.

In 1943 the Royal Society of the Arts, partly responsible for the Great Exhibition of 1851, suggested to the government that an international exhibition along similar lines be staged in 1951 to commemorate the earlier event. To propose a celebratory occasion in 1943 was an act of faith that the war would not only end successfully, but that Britain would have recovered sufficiently by 1951 to warrant such a demonstration. In September 1945, with the war over and Labour in power, Gerald Barry, the editor of the News Chronicle, addressed an open letter to Stafford Cripps, then President of the Board of Trade, advocating a trade and cultural exhibition in London as a way of commemorating the centenary of the Crystal Palace. Such an exhibition would advertise British products and display British prowess in design and craftsmanship. He favored a site in the center of London, such as Hyde Park or Battersea, either of which would provide ample space for such an exhibition. What prompted these suggestions was the need to provide practical help to British commerce at a time when it was clearly under pressure shifting from wartime controls to peacetime competition.