Paul Corthorn
Paul Corthorn is Professor of Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland, United Kingdom). His research and teaching concerns twentieth-century British history, especially its political and international dimensions. He is the Ketelby Fellow in Late Modern History at the University of St Andrews in 2025-26.
Paul Corthorn has worked extensively on the politics of the Left and on various aspects of the Cold War in Britain. His first book, In the Shadow of the Dictators: The British Left in the 1930s, was published in 2006. He has been joint editor of the Labour History Review since 2012.
Paul Corthorn’s book about Enoch Powell, the Conservative and Ulster Unionist MP, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019 and appeared in paperback in 2022. He is Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project on ‘Conservatism and Unionism in the UK, 1968-1997,’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and running from 2023 to 2026.
Paul Corthorn has just finished writing a book entitled Thatcher’s Cold War: The Battle of Ideas, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2026. He was previously Co-Investigator (CI) of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘The Politics of Consumer Credit in the UK, 1938-1992,’ which resulted in a co-authored monograph published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
Paul Corthorn has published major articles in generalist History journals including English Historical Review, European History Quarterly, Journal of British Studies and Historical Journal.
Paul Corthorn has served on the Steering Committee of History UK, the body representing all History departments, and was co-opted to the Royal Historical Society Education Policy Committee. He is a member of the sub-panel for History in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029.
Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Session
I will reflect on my experience of writing two related books on the prominent late twentieth-century British Conservative politicians Enoch Powell (1912-98), who set the political agenda, and Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), who was UK Prime Minister for over 11 years. The books grapple with one of the conference’s main themes: understanding the historical precedents of a connected but not globalised world by examining two figures whose political careers were spent in the shadow of the Cold War.
Amid divisions between East and West from the mid-1940s, I will discuss Powell and Thatcher’s evolving (and distinct) viewpoints on: the British Empire and Commonwealth; relations with the United States and the Soviet Union; nuclear weapons; neoliberalism (pitting economic and political freedom against centralised state control); and UK membership of the European Community. In each area, the arguments advanced by Powell and Thatcher were shaped, in different ways, by commitments to the British nation, which characterised their Conservatism. I will reflect on methodology, in particular my concern to take seriously the ideas of politicians (and the speeches through which they articulated them) and to place them firmly in their domestic and international political context. I will give prominence to Asia, ranging from Powell’s experiences in India in the 1940s through to Thatcher’s views of Chinese (and as opposed to Soviet) Communism and to her suggestion, in the mid-1980s, that South Korea engage more with North Korea – following her example of building contacts with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe).