In 1946, when Winston Churchill referred to the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK in his ‘Sinews of Peace’ address, he was referring to the strikingly close political, economic, diplomatic and military alliance between the two nations. Alongside and throughout the cultural history of this very pragmatic alliance, however, there have always existed US–UK ‘special relationships’ of another kind – love affairs carried out across the expanse of the Atlantic, as British and American peoples have flirted, courted and fallen in love, with one another but often too with the idea(l) of that other place across the ocean. US–UK love affairs have thus proven to be a mainstay of romantic narratives for generations, shared across literature, music, television, film and all the arts. At a critical historical juncture in the ongoing viability of the special relationship, this collection examines some of the history, contemporary manifestations and enduring appeal of this paradigm for a global and interdisciplinary audience. What are the economic and ideological factors that have fuelled this romantic framework? What have been its recurrent tropes across disciplinary, national and temporal boundaries? And how does the notion of ‘love across the Atlantic’ speak to collective fantasies of home, desire, escape and identity?

As is suggested by the volume's title, a key ambition – and challenge – for this book has been to situate the ‘special relationship’ across a range of media, while also wanting to capture something of both the rich history and the urgent timeliness of this paradigm. Hence, in what follows, this collection examines popular texts and discourses from the last hundred years, in the areas of film, television, literature, music, news, and politics, and how they together point to recurrent preoccupations found across representations of US–UK romance. Within this, a significant portion of the volume is devoted to film, which proved to be far and away the most popular focus in responses to our call for papers, suggesting that cinema is perhaps perceived as the medium to have represented the special relationship most ubiquitously and expressively during and since the twentieth century.