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This chapter examines the genesis and development of the Conservative book clubs, namely the Right Book Club, championed by Christina Foyle of the booksellers W & G Foyle, and the National Book Association promoted by Arthur Bryant, head of the Education department at Ashridge College. The chapter shows how these organisations were part of a Conservative attempt to counter what was seen as a Leftist dominance of the world of letters.

This chapter discusses new research concerning the pronouncements of anti-Market pundits including historians C.E. Carrington and Sir Arthur Bryant and economists James Meade and Roy Harrod. It traces the origins of their dissent and differentiates between the intractable sceptics and those whose opposition evolved from a ‘wait and see’ position. This chapter suggests in their analysis these pundits emphasised the political rather than the economic goals of the Treaty of Rome.

In 1930, the Conservative historian, Keith Feiling, published a pamphlet entitled What is Conservatism? This is a question, which has troubled historians of political thought and political philosophers over the entire 20^th century. In spite of the party’s political and electoral dominance in the inter-war years, that period saw no more certainty than any other as to the essence of Conservatism. But it was also the Baldwinian party, which created the two most ambitious political research and education projects undertaken by the Conservative party in the ‘Conservative Century’ to define the ‘practical ideal’ of Conservatism. These two projects, the Conservative Research Department (CRD) and the Bonar Law Memorial College at Ashridge, were both founded in 1929 and were regarded as related institutional attempts to provide echo-chambers for Conservative thought. CRD’s activities have been examined in a study by John Ramsden, but this chapter explores in depth the political education project of the Bonar Law College (known as Ashridge) and, in so doing, offers a fuller contextualisation of CRD’s activities and also examine the formation of the idea of the Conservative intellectual.

This chapter explores how ideas and images of Britain’s Naval past were represented by the historian Arthur Bryant and the president of the Royal Naval College, Admiral Barry Domvile, at the Greenwich Night Pageant in June 1933. Bryant sought to revitalise the present by romanticizing the past, motivated by his desire to raise awareness of Britain’s past glories to halt a perceived decline in patriotism during the interwar period. Using material sourced from a range of archives, including the National Maritime Museum, the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives and the National Archives, this article will show how representations of Britain’s naval heritage was utilised in debates about the nature of British identity in an era of imperial decline and an increasingly volatile international situation in the period before the Second World War.

The central battleground in the ‘war of ideas’ concerned history. Conservatives felt that history was intrinsic to Conservative principles and that ‘Conservative attitude to life arises out of the historic approach. To the Conservative history is not « bunk » for it provides checks against rash action. It is « bunk » only to those who think, in their vanity, that it is possible for a community to start all over afresh’. In terms of political conflict, differing interpretations of the past were essential to building alternative paths for the present and future. It was in this context that the Conservatives set out to challenge what they saw as the dominance of the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ and construct a ‘Tory interpretation of history’. Whereas the ‘Whigs’ were predisposed to seeing laws and patterns in history, leading to the ‘progress’, ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’ or other abstract nouns, Conservatives emphasised contingency and chance, in which outcomes rarely matched intentions, and of which concrete historical entities were the product. This section will examine the Conservative attempt to write an alternative interpretation of history, which sustained Conservative values, through the works of Keith Feiling, George Kitson Clark, Arthur Bryant, F.J.C. Hearnshaw and many other lesser-known figures.