More than most authors, I suspect, it has often occurred to me during the composition of this book that, in an ideal world, it would not have had to be written. Biographers and historians of literature, in my ideal, would have long since noted the race-thinking in the work of virtually everyone published before the Second World War. Literary critics, following suit, would have played their part and subjected the racial discourse of a favoured author to the same degree of close reading as, over the years, has been applied to other aspects of a writer's work. But, of course, such musings are far from the truth. Instead, the question of ‘race’ has, for the most part, been written out of literary-historical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. At best, biographies might include a few pages at the end to explain one or two ‘unfortunate’ passages which are usually deemed to be inconsequential aberrations. Or, a literary critic might be spurred to the defence of a cherished author against the pernicious charge of ‘racism’ or ‘antisemitism’. Such are the involuntary strategies that are used to trivialize and marginalize those repressive aspects of liberal culture which, in effect, enables them to continue.

In an attempt to redress the balance, this book demonstrates the extent to which race-thinking about Jews was, in fact, a key ingredient in the emerging cultural identity of modern Britain.