This volume derives from a 2009 conference sponsored by the Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the University of Leicester and London's Wiener Library (now located in Russell Square), the first library and archive dedicated to the study of anti-Semitism. Eschewing a comprehensive survey of “all the questions in relation to the memory and representation of the Holocaust in Britain,” the editors desire “to explore the complexities of British memory culture in more depth, and by presenting a wide range of approaches, reflect and inspire a critical interdisciplinary discourse” (vii). Its main foci are how awareness of the Holocaust has been intensified and transformed through film and television, commemorative anniversary events, the naming of an official Holocaust Memorial Day, and the establishment of a permanent Holocaust exhibition in London's Imperial War Museum.

While largely achieving its goal, the book may have been enhanced by a more direct engagement with the pertinent historical research. For instance, the chapters by Duncan Little, Tony Kushner, and James Jordan all intersect the work of Joe White, a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on British prisoners of war interned at Auschwitz. The accounts of a few of these prisoners, some rather imaginatively recast as saviors of Jews, became a factor in emerging British perspectives on the Holocaust. Although he was not present at the conference, the editors would have been wise to solicit a contribution from White. Surprisingly, there is no mention anywhere of Frank Foley (1884–1958), whose well-documented exploits in assisting thousands of Jews (as a spy but ostensibly a passport officer in Berlin) became increasingly prominent in Britain since 1995.

Caroline Sharples, one of the editors, argues in her own chapter that the Nuremberg Trials (International Military Tribunal) did not generate much interest in the Nazi war on the Jews in Britain. While this is no doubt true, Sharples missed an important caveat by not considering the Hollywood film that trailed the event by fifteen years, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Spencer Tracy. This apparently was the first commercial film to have shown footage of mounds of corpses being reburied and bulldozed in a concentration camp. Surely fewer Britons saw Judgment at Nuremberg than Holocaust (1978), the American made-for-TV mini-series on BBC1, which is the main subject of Tim Cole's article. But the reception of Judgment at Nuremberg is an important lacuna. A stage version of the film was produced on Broadway in 2001, and at least two productions subsequently appeared in London.

The chapter by the co-editor, Olaf Jensen, underscores “the surprisingly positive and almost apologetic image of the Germans and the Nazis” in British media, indicating “that the image of the ‘the Germans’ is much better than that of ‘the Jews’ or, even more so, that of ‘the Americans’, ‘the Japanese’, or ‘the Russians.’” Reactions to movies about the Holocaust in the UK, according to Jensen, reveal “that many people still think only a small number of Germans were ‘real’ Nazis and that the rest were reeled in through propaganda, brainwashed, and shot or put into a concentration camp if they did not obey, and therefore are not really responsible for the crimes of Nazi Germany” (117). Ahistorical perceptions of the Holocaust were exacerbated by films such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) and The Reader (2009).

Anton Capet surveys the related history with “Holocaust Art at the Imperial War Museum, 1945–2009,” and Rebecca Jinks juxtaposes the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust Exhibition with its portrayal in “Crimes Against Humanity,” which materialized two years later. Mark Donnelly compares the fiftieth anniversaries of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, and Andy Pearce asks if Britain's Holocaust Memorial Day aims to impart more of a “‘British’ or ‘European’ Holocaust consciousness.” For scholars of British studies generally, Tom Lawson's consideration of both the prevention of and perpetration of genocide on the part of Britain is one of the book's most suggestive essays. Lawson's reference to genocide in Tasmania (163–65), however, might have been tempered by recalling the British government's effective yet subtle intervention in Pakistani violence against its Bengali citizens in 1971, as has been examined by Angela Debnath.

Dan Stone provides an apt conclusion by recalling that “Britain came relatively late to Holocaust consciousness” (212), but that the Holocaust had nevertheless become entrenched in “British heritage” (213), transformed “from ‘event’ to ‘heritage’ . . . because it got swept up in the culture of commemoration that came to dominate British dealings with the past in general in the 1980s and 1990s” (220). While much of this amounts to little more then platitudes (226), Stone concedes that the phenomenon also precipitated interest in the Holocaust on the part of university students. This, too, is a segment of “memory work” worth exploring, but is largely untouched. The book includes brief references to the international meeting on “Nazi gold” (198, 209, 221) but does not consider the academic ramifications, as evinced by the path breaking scholarship of Jonathan Steinberg.

It is worth mentioning that Britain has nourished critical historical research engaging the Holocaust, such as the multivolume biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw, Christopher Browning's integration of perpetrators' and survivors' perspectives (given as the Trevelyan lectures at Cambridge, 1999), and the numerous bridges between public Holocaust-related initiatives and scholarship built by David Cesarani and Tony Kushner. Richard Evans, spurred by his role in the idiotic lawsuit of David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, continues to develop Holocaust-centered research and relishes publicity for heated exchanges with scholarly colleagues. The ties between Britain and the Holocaust are even more rich, impactful, complex, and contradictory than is revealed in this informative book.