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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Ben Highmore, "In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style" (Manchester UP, 2023)
Description: How did the rise of consumerism impact Britain? In In Good Taste: How Britain's Middle Classes Found Their Style (Manchester UP, 2023), Ben Highmore, a Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, explores this question by telling the story of key British institutions and cultural habits. The book uses a wealth of different sources, including newspapers, lifestyle magazines, shopping catalogues, plays, books, and television programmes, as well as architecture and design, in order to think through key forms of social identity and the structures of feeling underpinning social change. The book...