Outside a student pub in Sheffield – inasmuch as there is still such a thing in these days of abstemious youth – a ripped poster advertises a ‘Stop Tommy Robinson’ demo. Someone has scribbled out ‘Stop’ and written in ‘Back Him’. And so the war wears on. But this isn’t why I’m here. The University of Sheffield is home to one of the country’s most valuable archives relating to British fascism and the far right. I’m here to research my next book, an exploration of interwar fascism in the English countryside.

The cardboard files of the archive brim with copies of the British Union Quarterly and the Woman Fascist (‘Are you coming to the Blackshirt Cabaret Ball?’), orders for British Union of Fascists (BUF) uniforms and merchandise (‘please send me a buttonless type of blackshirt, in spite of the high price’) and Mosley-branded diaries (‘Oct 4, 1936: BUF London … Reds in full force … Big loss for Fascism’). 

Among them, I come across Ralph Jebb. There were plenty of writers in and around the Blackshirt movement, and even more men who wrote a great deal without ever being writers. Some were in deep: Henry Williamson, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis. Others – T S Eliot, H J Massingham