Moving Lives: Narratives of Nation and Migration among Europeans in Post-War Britain . By Kathy Burrell. Histories and Memories: Migrants and Their History in Britain . Edited by Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi.

Moving Lives: Narratives of Nation and Migration among Europeans in Post-War Britain . By Kathy Burrell. Histories and Memories: Migrants and Their History in Britain . Edited by Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi.

Abstract

Moving Lives: Narratives of Nation and Migration among Europeans in Post-War Britain. By Kathy Burrell. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006. vii þ 212 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4574-6, £50. Histories and Memories: Migrants and Their History in Britain. Edited by Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi. Tauris Academic Studies, London, 2006. xi þ 311 pp. ISBN 1-84511-042-0, £49.50. Kathy Burrell’s Moving Lives and the collection of essays in Histories and Memories edited by herself and Panikos Panayi are two of the most concise responses to the latter’s remark a few years earlier that ‘there is enormous scope for historians to use oral history for the study of immigrants in post-war Britain’ (Panayi, The Impact of immigration: a documentary history of the effects and experiences of immigrants in Britain since 1945, 1999, p. 32). Both books employ oral history methods to understand migrant experiences as the processes of both emigration and immigration, incorporated in narratives and memories of ‘home’, national identities and belonging. Based on interviews she conducted with Polish, Italian and Greek–Cypriot migrant populations in Leicester, Burrell’s analysis in Moving Lives is structured around her respondents’ narratives of migration, of their national identities, transnational networks and community life. Through these four themes, emphasis