The result of two rich centenary conferences held in Edinburgh and London, the two cities linked to the biography of Stuart Hood (1915–2011), this book explores the cultural action of a veritable éminence grise who shaped many interlinked academic and creative fields (media studies, translation, creative writing, documentary film-making) and who was shaped, in turn, by the historical events in which he took an active role. Hood was a genuine polymath and a man of substantial intellectual talents. He volunteered for the Army in 1940 and joined the Italian Resistance in December 1943. He reached the top of the BBC (which he joined in 1946) as Controller, a position he held in 1961–4, despite his obvious communist sympathies. A man of rare intellectual clarity and integrity, he then went on to teach media studies at the Royal College of Arts where he very openly supported student protests. After his resignations in 1978, he joined Goldsmiths’ College and then Sussex University. A linguist, a writer, and a prolific translator from Italian (twenty-five titles), German, French, and Russian, Hood honed his language knowledge during the war. Only two decades later he managed to put on paper his traumatic war experience. Published in 1963, the year of Beppe Fenoglio's untimely death and one year earlier than Luigi Meneghello's I piccoli maestri, Pebbles from My Skull (published as Carlino in 1985) recounts Hood's experiences in the partisan bands, and, like Meneghello's 1964 novel and Fenoglio's Il partigiano Johnny (which Hood translated in 1995), this book was subjected to revisions that reflected an uneasiness with, and the inherent instability of, the traumatic subject matter. It is fair to say that it is precisely Hood's formative war experience, his translations from Italian (spanning Goffredo Parise, Dacia Maraini, Dario Fo, and Pier Paolo Pasolini), and this memoir that warrant Hood a special place in the network of British cultural operators that consolidated a bridge between postwar British and Italian cultures. In this sense, Hood's trajectory has many points of contact with Raleigh Trevelyan's, who also served in the British Army, published accounts of his war experience in Italy, translated from Italian (in particular Meneghello's I piccoli maestri), and worked in the British publishing industry.

Divided into four parts, this collection starts with Behind Enemy Lines, where four chapters contextualise Stuart Hood's journey during the Second World War, from officer to partisan. In this section, the first chapter by Terry Brotherstone examines the impact of his Scottish upbringing (from a childhood in Edzell and Montrose to Edinburgh university) on Hood's embrace of the Marxist outlook and his decision to enrol in the Army in 1940. The other three chapters by Hilary Horrocks, Nick Havely, and Philip Cooke focus respectively on Hood's experience of the Resistance (Horrocks), on his reading of Dante while in war-torn Tuscany (Havely), and on the historiographical context surrounding Carlino (Cooke). Cooke's chapter is particularly important as it provides a very useful account of the historiographical development concerning the Italian Resistance, examining the perspectives of both Italian and British historians.

The second section, Media Radical, contains contributions examining Hood's contribution to the BBC and to the field of media studies, combining a deeply personal angle, most evident in Tony Garnett's and Haim Bresheeth's chapters, with a cogent examination of Hood's publications in the field (six volumes, including the influential On Television). This section enriches our understanding of Hood's cultural action in British media, tracking his ascent to the senior management board of the BBC in the years of profound transformation after Reith. The contributions also highlight Hood's visionary and uncompromising interpretation of documentary film-making, as well as his lucid critique of political influence over public broadcasting. Writing this review in a period characterised by an unprecedented political attack on the BBC, one cannot but feel that Stuart Hood's reflections are not only relevant but prescient.

The third section, A Life Reconsidered, contains two chapters authored by Robert Lumley: a revised version of a longer interview, held in instalments between 1984 and 1986, originally published in The Edinburgh Review in 1988, followed by an analysis of Hood's professional and intellectual experience of the institutions he worked for (from the British Army to the BBC and the Royal College of Art). The final section explores Hood's literary and translation activity. Stephen Watts and David Johnson's contribution examines his considerable translation output, highlighting its diversity not only in terms of languages but also in terms of authors (from the conservative Ernst Jünger to the Marxist Bertolt Brecht) and genres (theatre, novels, poetry). His copious literary production is the object of the inquiry of the two final chapters by Alan Riach and David Johnson, who analyse two different groups of novels with each contribution establishing a diverse and multilingual literary constellation (whose cardinal points are Brecht, Orwell, Fried, and MacDiarmid), allowing us to understand the depth and breadth of Hood's thinking through fiction.

This collection of essays is a fitting tribute to a polymathic figure of postwar British culture, with each contribution exploring specific aspects of Stuart Hood's intellectual and professional action while also successfully evoking a richly detailed context in which to situate Hood's multifarious and impactful output. I have only one minor quibble. Most of the contributions draw on or make reference to Lumley's interview which, albeit in a much revised form, can be considered the pulsating heart of the volume. It would have helped the reader to place this wide-ranging interview at the beginning and then resume the chronologically inflected thematic arrangements of this carefully structured volume.