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No Time to Say Goodbye to Bond

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Daniel Craig’s last film as James Bond sees him go out with a bang rather than a whimper. But it’s a rare thing for a Bond star to leave on their own terms, argues James Chapman, University of Leicester.

5 October 2021

The much-anticipated, and much-delayed, release of No Time to Die, the 25th entry in the Eon Productions series chronicling the adventures of Ian Fleming’s apparently ageless secret agent hero, James Bond, closes the ‘era’ of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, which began on 15 October 2005 with that now-notorious press conference beside the River Thames in which Craig, entering via a Royal Navy RIB, was widely if unfairly mocked for wearing a life-jacket. Five films and over US $3 billion at the box office later, and no-one is mocking Craig now. The man who was deemed by some fans ‘too short’ and ‘too blonde’ for Bond has indelibly put his stamp on the role of Britain’s most famous super-spy.

It’s been public knowledge for some time that No Time To Die – delayed first by the departure of original director Danny Boyle and then by successive postponements due to the closure of cinemas during the global Coronavirus pandemic – would be Craig’s last Bond adventure. His place in the history of cinematic Bond is assured. But how does his exit compare to other last films by his predecessors who also carried Bond’s ‘licence to kill’?

It turns out that, rather like politicians and sports stars, Bond actors have rarely had the chance to choose the timing and nature of their exit from the stage.

Never say ‘never’ to Bond

Sean Connery was the first cinematic Bond, beginning with Dr No (1962), and remains the yardstick against which all new Bonds are judged. Connery was also unique in having no fewer than three ‘last’ Bond pictures. He first announced his retirement from Her Majesty’s Secret Service during the shooting of You Only Live Twice (1967) in Japan, where he tired of the constant press intrusion. For those who don’t know their SMERSH from their SPECTRE, You Only Live Twice is the one where the villain’s lair is inside a hollowed-out volcano and mod cons include a pool of man-eating piranhas. Some critics have suggested that Connery looks bored in You Only Live Twice: he certainly looks uneasy during his unconvincing disguise as a Japanese fisherman.

Connery was always going to be a hard act to follow. Australian model-turned-actor George Lazenby, who starred in On Her Majesty’s Service (1969), lasted for just the one film. Although it was less successful at the box office than previous Bonds, this was probably due as much to the film’s downbeat ending (Bond’s wife Tracy is shot dead before their honeymoon) as to the inexperienced Lazenby, who was excellent in the action sequences and not at all bad in the dramatic moments. But Lazenby felt that Bond was ‘Connery’s gig’ and left of his own accord. OHMSS is now regarded as one of the best Bond films within the fan culture, an early hint of the greater emotional and psychological depth of the Craig films.

The distributor United Artists drew the conclusion that Connery was irreplaceable and lured him back for Diamonds Are Forever (1971) with a bumper salary and an offer to make two other films of his choice. For non-enthusiasts, Diamonds Are Forever is the one where Bond nearly gets cremated, drives a moon buggy across the Nevada desert and gets knocked around by two athletic women called Bambi and Thumper. It would fair to say that Diamonds Are Forever is a mess: the plot doesn’t make much sense (even by the standards of the James Bond films) and the tone is uneven (the death of Plenty O’Toole is particularly nasty in a film that otherwise adopts a tone of high camp). But Connery, purring his way through the film with the self-satisfied smirk of a man earning over $1 million and a percentage of the box office, was clearly enjoying himself more than in Twice.

Connery intended that Diamonds would definitively be his last Bond appearance, telling the press ‘never again’. Like Steve Redgrave after the 1996 Olympics, however, he came back one more time in the ironically-entitled Never Say Never Again (1983). This was a ‘remake’ of Thunderball produced outside the Eon Productions series by Kevin McClory. [i] It’s neither the best nor the worst of the Bond pictures, but Connery’s swansong doesn’t match up to sixties classics such as From Russia With Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1964).

More – much more – Roger Moore!

The king of eyebrow acting, Roger Moore starred as Bond in seven films, from Live and Let Die (1973) to A View To a Kill (1985). Three years older than Connery, Moore was 45 when he first uttered the line ‘Bond – James Bond’. Initially signed to a three-picture contract, there was always a sense that Moore was making his last Bond film. The opening scene of For Your Eyes Only (1981) was clearly written to introduce a new actor by linking to Bond’s past, and it’s known that James Brolin screen tested for Octopussy (1983), but in the end the terms were always agreed for ‘one more’ film. Prior to A View To a Kill, however, Moore and Bond producer Cubby Broccoli agreed that this would be his last.

A View To a Kill is undoubtedly one of the weaker Bonds and the consensus is that it was a mission too far for the 57-year-old Moore whose role by now had become akin to a high-salaried stand-in for the teams of stunt performers. Moore’s swansong is saddled with an annoying heroine – the late Tanya Roberts is even less convincing as a geologist than Denise Richards’s nuclear scientist in The World Is Not Enough – and a poorly structured script that cheats the audience out of the promised showdown between Bond and Grace Jones’s larger-than-life villainess May Day. It’s also the one where Bond escapes Russian pursuers by snowboarding to the strains of ‘Surfing USA’ and reveals his hitherto unknown culinary prowess to demonstrate that real agents do eat quiche. A lukewarm critical reception confirmed that it was time for a change. [ii]

From Dalton to Brosnan

Timothy Dalton – for many Fleming purists the closest to the author’s characterisation of Bond – made only two pictures before a dispute between Eon and distributor MGM/United Artists led to a long hiatus in the early 1990s. The Living Daylights (1987), the 25th anniversary Bond picture, was seen at the time as breathing new life into an old warhorse of a series that had started to look stale, and the classically-trained Dalton was praised for bring fresh vitality and a degree of grittiness to the role. These attributes were highlighted even more prominently in his second outing Licence To Kill (1989). This film deliberately did away with the criminal megalomaniacs and other sensational plot devices of other 007 adventures: Bond is pitted against a ‘real world’ villain in the form of drugs baron Franz Sanchez (a brilliant Robert Davi), though the stunts and action set pieces are as impressive as ever. The harder-edged violence of Licence To Kill earned a more restrictive ‘15’ certificate in the UK which made it off-limits for the traditional family audience of the Bond pictures. It divided critics and underperformed at the US box office, but, like OHMSS, has since received sympathetic reappraisal. Licence To Kill was ahead of its time: the first Daniel Craig Bond film – just without Daniel Craig. It should not have been Dalton’s last.

Dalton had been cast as Bond only when Pierce Brosnan, the original choice for The Living Daylights, became unavailable due to his commitment to the television series Remington Steele. Brosnan’s turn came when Dalton and the producers decided by mutual consent that there had been too long a hiatus between Licence To Kill and GoldenEye (1995). Brosnan pitched his Bond somewhere between the light comedy style of Roger Moore and the seriousness of Timothy Dalton. It was evidently a popular interpretation, as each of Brosnan’s four Bond films took more at the box office than its predecessor. However, like Dalton, the circumstances of his leaving the series were not of his own choosing. His last, Die Another Day (2002), was a mixed bag, never quite able to resolve the internal tension between realism (Bond’s capture and torture ordeal in a North Korean prison) and outright fantasy (this is the one with the Ice Palace and the invisible Aston Martin). For all its popular success, producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson resolved that they wanted once again to pursue a grittier style.

The end of an era

Casino Royale (2006) – the first film since the 1960s to use significant amounts of the original novel – marked a new direction for Bond: tougher and more psychologically plausible, even if the action sequences remained as improbable as ever. It met with near-universal critical acclaim. Quantum of Solace (2008) was a mess, its production disrupted by a writers’ strike, but Skyfall (2012) took Bond to new box-office heights, becoming the highest-grossing film in the series to date (unadjusted for inflation), and Spectre (2015) consolidated that success as the second highest-grossing.

The Daniel Craig films differ from previous eras of Bond: there’s a greater emotional depth (albeit within the parameters of what are still big action movies: Bond is no exercise in Ken Loach-style realism) and a continuing narrative arc that links the films. Quantum of Solace was a direct follow-up to Casino Royale and No Time To Die is a sequel to Spectre, with returning characters Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) and Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) – the latter in a Hannibal Lecter-style cameo – as well as the now-familiar ‘Scooby Gang’ of ‘M’ (Ralph Fiennes), Moneypenny (Naomi Harris), ‘Q’ (Ben Wishaw) and Tanner (Rory Kinnear).

Personally I was left rather underwhelmed by No Time to Die: perhaps this time the hype and expectation were too much, especially after the repeated delays to its release. There’s a lot in the film to like, including some nice visual nods to Bond films past and the inclusion of material from Fleming, especially the references to the novel of You Only Live Twice. I liked the character of Paloma (Ana de Armas), though she features rather too briefly, and the banter between the retired Bond and new ‘007’ Nomi (Lashana Lynch) as their relationship develops from initial rivalry to mutual respect. But I felt that the desire to tie up all the left-over plot elements of Craig’s previous films meant the film was too overcrowded. And I never really understood *why* (as opposed to how) the villain Safin (an under-used Rami Malek) wants to wipe out half the human race. Even a Bond megalomaniac needs some sort of warped, perverse logic for the chaos they seek to create.

The Daniel Craig Bond films have succeeded in bringing a new level of critical respectability to a nearly 60-year old film franchise. That deserves to be acknowledged as a major achievement. And Craig got to choose the moment and the manner of his swansong. The end credits of No Time To Die promise (as ever) that ‘James Bond Will Return’. Whoever is the next 007 will have a hard act to follow.

Figures of all six James Bonds, Madame Tussauds, 2021.

[i] Strictly speaking, Never Say Never Again was ‘based on a screen story by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming’ rather than being an actual remake of Thunderball. It’s a moot distinction, but matters to the lawyers.

[ii]  Moore later took umbrage at comments in Cubby Broccoli’s autobiography When the Snow Melts (Boxtree, 1998) that he didn’t want to relinquish the role. It may be that Broccoli’s collaborator Donald Zec added the comment to spice up the book.

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and author of Licence To Kill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (I. B. Tauris, 2nd edn 2007). He is currently writing a stand-alone study of the first Bond film, Dr No, to be published by Columbia University Press in October 2022.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

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The film raw stock shortage in the British zone of occupied Germany and its impact on the film industry after 1945

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Hanja Dämon, independent scholar

24 September 2021

This blog post engages with one of the biggest material obstacles in restarting film production in the British Zone of occupied Germany (one of four zones established following the Allied victory) after the Second World War: the shortage of film raw stock. It was essential for newsreels, for making copies of feature films to be exhibited in German cinemas, as well as for making new documentaries and feature films. Indeed, films were supposed to assist in steering the Germans away from National Socialist ideology, and to teach them about the outside world from which they had been supposedly cut off during twelve years of dictatorship. In this vein, the British feared that without raw stock ‘the whole scheme of re-education will be in danger of collapse’, and looked for ways to secure the provision of this sought-after material for non-fiction and feature films alike.[i] Yet this task was not always easy, as archival sources from the UK National Archives in Kew Gardens reveal. They testify to the fact that insufficient raw stock provision significantly impacted on German film production after 1945.

National Socialism’s defeat in May 1945 and Germany’s division into US-American, British, French and Soviet zones of occupation had initially brought German film production to a standstill, only to be re-established according to the respective agendas of the respective occupation authorities. In the western zones the main goals of the occupiers included  denazification, democratisation and decentralisation of the German film industry, which should not be concentrated in one place (to lessen the chances of state interference). In the Soviet Zone one central studio (DEFA) was established. Although  no new German films were produced for more than a year, re-establishing the film industry was considered essential across all zones for economic and psychological reasons. The Allied powers aspired to give the German filmmakers the tools of self-expression for the purpose of democratisation, although during the first years of occupation Allied supervision and control would seek to ensure that the resulting films would not propagate fascism and militaristic values.

One major obstacle in re-starting film production in the western zones was the shortage of film raw stock, at least in the Western zones. In August 1945, Major General Bishop from the British Information Control Section informed the international press, that ‘as soon as raw-stock supplies make it possible, Germans will be granted permission to produce their own films’, thereby indicating that the lack of raw stock played a role in delaying the reconstruction of the industry in the British Zone.[ii] A year later the Public Relations/Information Services Control (PR/ISC) Division explained as to why up to this point only two production companies had been licensed in the British Zone: the available amount of raw stock was ‘insufficient to allow for further commitments’ regarding the founding of additional production units.[iii] Also in the US Zone, the raw stock shortage was described as ‘one of the main problems’ in reconstructing the German film industry.[iv]

FO 1046/409/9: Raw stock procurement (The National Archives)

No raw stock producing factory existed in the Western zones of Germany, which is why it had to be imported from the Soviet Zone or from other countries. As the relationship between the British and their Soviet Allies became more strained, a member of the British occupation authorities, G.W.E.J. Erskine, began to harbour doubts in September 1946 that one could continue relying on the Soviets for raw stock provisions, for ‘the Russian character and international trends make this a source on which undue reliance should not be placed.’[v] He warned that ‘the dependence of the British Zone for its main supplies of rawstock from the Soviet Zone is capable of producing a sudden crisis at any moment if for any reason supplies were cut off’.[vi] And indeed, deliveries from the Soviet Zone were not always consistent with initial arrangements and in 1947 even stalled for months.[vii] Michael Balfour of the British Information Services Control Branch wrote on the 12th of May 1947 that he was ‘getting a bit alarmed over the raw stock position’ and, while his concern also included the dubbing of films into German, ‘German production is beginning to need rawstock acutely and there is none left.[viii] The shortage of raw stock was therefore certainly a contributing factor in why the German film industry took longer to re-emerge in the Western zones of occupation compared to the Soviet Zone.

Owing to better infrastructure and more decisive actions on the parts of the Soviets in getting the film industry restarted more swiftly, the Soviet-licensed film Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Amongst Us, D: Wolfgang Staudte) was the first German new film to premiere in post-war Germany in October 1946. It was, however, closely followed by the British-licensed film Sag die Wahrheit (Tell the Truth, D: Helmut Weiss) in December 1946, filmed in the Tempelhof studios in the US sector of Berlin. Sag die Wahrheit recycled the script of a film that had been in production at UFA-Studios during the war, which  had remained unfinished. It was an escapist comedy that made no allusions to the post-war present, which made this film an unusual offering compared to all other British-licensed films of the early post-war period that were generally set in the present or the recent past. The British had the power to select which projects could be realised via licensing only those they found suitable, and usually rejected film scripts that were regarded as merely “escapist”. Yet this criteria was apparently not as relevant at the time when Sag die Wahrheit was allowed to go into production.

The raw stock shortage might, in fact, have played a direct role in  the British decision to license Sag die Wahrheit. The material was not only needed for making new German films, but also for making copies of old films, and in autumn 1946, a memo expressed the desire to have a new German film made. It stated that it would be ‘sad if we had to use raw stock to make fresh copies of old films because we have not enough films to circulate’.[ix] Hence, to finally have a new German film available, the British might have allowed Sag die Wahrheit (D: Helmut Weiss, 1946) to become the very first film to be made in their zone, as this project promised a quick production. After this first film, the British tended to license films that at least attempted to deal with contemporary issues, and begun to pre-censor film scripts with this criteria in mind.

The British based their argument for the necessity of pre-censoring of German film scripts directly on the lack of raw stock: pre-censorship was thought ‘essential in view of the extreme shortage of rawstock not only in Germany but all over the world and is to avoid wastage of stock on film production, which, when finished, would have to be rejected on political grounds’.[x] In July 1948, a series of articles in the Hamburger Freie Presse started to ask what kind of films were considered politically desirable by the British authorities. Were films required to spread optimistic messages in the British Zone, as one author of these articles assumed? The Film Section reiterated that pre-censorship was necessary in light of the limited availability of raw stock, furthermore claiming it was too precious to allow the making of ‘pure entertainment films’, confirming thereby that instead of escapism the British privileged films with a message suited to post-war circumstances.[xi] One proposal that was indeed rejected by the British Film Section because it was regarded as nothing more than ‘quite a nice story’ was German director Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s plan to make a film about a young and poor aspiring dancer, entitled Tanz in die Welt (Dance into the World).[xii] Apparently different standards were applied to subsequent film projects than to the first film made in the British Zone, Sag die Wahrheit.

Raw stock was also needed for export copies of new post-war German films, in order to be able to send prints to potential buyers abroad. Once the first films had been made, considerations to export them meant that even more raw stock would be needed in addition to  existing requirements. The British film adviser and documentary filmmaker Arthur Elton deemed it necessary to import additional raw stock  for this purpose. Elton highlights in a memorandum how short supply of raw stock  might hinder the export chances of new German films.[xiii] The material constraints, then, were posing significant obstacles to get the German film industry up and running again.

Lastly, the lack of raw stock also determined what British films were shown in the British Zone. The British producer J. Arthur Rank at first provided raw stock free of charge that was used for dubbing British films into German, but in 1946 he signalled unwillingness to continue this arrangement. It was at this point that the idea arose to allow Rank to set up a distribution organisation in Germany, in order to secure the import of raw stock.[xiv] An initial plan of the Finance Division to make British distribution companies pay a ‘good-will’ fee to the German state when operating in Germany – money intended for the use of re-building the German film industry – was abandoned to accommodate Rank and to guarantee his future cooperation.[xv] Unlike Rank, other British companies did not have the means to distribute their films in post-war Germany because they were financially unable to provide the raw stock for copies of their films, which was a prerequisite for showing them in Germany.[xvi]

The link between material issues – such as the lack of raw stock – and post-war German film production is a topic where the archives can reveal more than was previously known about the German film industry’s re-establishment in the British Zone. I researched the holdings in the UK National Archives to learn more about material obstacles such as the raw stock shortage as well as to explore how the British supervised and controlled German filmmaking in the immediate post-war years. I also consulted personal documents of German filmmakers located in German archives that reveal more details about film production in the British Zone after 1945. My forthcoming book that will be published with Peter Lang will present my findings on British film policy in occupied Germany in more detail.

[i] FO 943/549 Film, 1945-1948.

[ii] FO 371/46702 Control of Propaganda in Germany. Code 18. File 3. “British control policy for Newspapers, books, radio and entertainments. Transmits copy of statement made in Berlin by Major General Bishop to the international press on August 10th”.

[iii] FO 1056/86 PR/ISC Meetings and Reports. “Minutes of the Seventh Meeting held in Berlin”, 1 Aug 1946.

[iv] Military Government of Germany. U.S. Zone. Information Control. Bi-Monthly Review 24 (1 Jul 1947-30 Jun 1947).

[v] FO 1056/39. G.W.E.J. Erskine to the Office of the Deputy Military Governor, C.C.G (British Element), 6 Sep 1946.

[vi] FO 1006/216. G.W.E.J. Erskine, “Films in the British Zone of Germany”, 6 Sep 1946.

[vii] FO 1056/74. Public Relations/Information Services Control Group, “Minutes of the Thirtieth Meeting held in Berlin”, 3 July 1947.

[viii] FO 946/69. Michael Balfour to R.S. Crawford, Foreign Office (German Section), 12 May 1947.

[ix] FO 1056/86. Public Relations/Information Services Control Group. “Minutes of the Thirteenth Meeting held in Berlin”, 24th October 1946. See “Appendix A” of document.

[x] FO 1056/114: Draft of “Film Policy Directive”, to be approved by Chief, ISD, 14th May 1948.

[xi] [‘für den reinen Unterhaltungsfilm zu schade’.] ‘Und was sagt die Film-Section?’, Hamburger Freie Presse, 10 Aug 1948.

[xii] Adk: Liebeneiner 93. Handwritten note on exposé for Tanz in die Welt.

[xiii] FO 946/8. Arthur Elton, “Memorandum on Export of German Films”, 19 Nov 1947.

[xiv] FO 943/162 Film Production in the British Zone of Germany 1946.

[xv] FO 1056/39 Films: Policy and General. Chief of PR/ISC Group to Headquarters, C.C.G. (British Element) Distribution of British Film in Germany, 26 Jun 1947.

[xvi] Gabriele Clemens, Britische Kulturpolitik, p. 167.

Hanja Dämon has studied History at the University of Vienna and then obtained her PhD at King’s College London. Her thesis project on the German film industry after 1945 was sponsored for three years by the European Research Council (ECR)-funded project “Beyond Enemy Lines: Literature and Film in the British and American Zones of Occupied Germany, 1945-1949”. Dämon’s monograph on British film policies in post-war Germany will be upcoming with Peter Lang.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

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In Search of the Text

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Khadija Koroma, University of Leicester

14 July 2021

Doing PhD during a pandemic is no easy feat, especially when the PhD entails literature and texts that have long since gone out of publication. My research focuses on the representation of African women in postcolonial literature through the Heinemann African Writers series (AWS).

The AWS has published over 200 texts between 1962 and the early 2000s. With COVID and its endless lockdowns, the typical library/archives search for my primary texts were out of question. With a ban on physical copies of books through the interlibrary loan system, and the British Library either closed or with limited opening hours, I had no choice but to take my search to second hand online bookstores for the necessary texts. Searching for, locating, and buying 200+ texts, with most of the earlier AWS texts being out of print, was not an option for a self-funded PhD student. Apart from the financial strain that this would have caused me, it would have also taken up a large part of my PhD, giving me very little time to focus on the key texts or write my thesis. However, at the same time, I knew that I needed to read as wide and as much of the AWS as was feasible. With the focus of my thesis being the representation of women in the texts, I needed to ensure that there was female presence in the narratives, as well as in the authorships of the texts chosen for my thesis. After an initial reading of a few of the most popular books in the AWS, I realised that the scarcity of female authors, as well as the exclusion of women in the texts, meant that I needed a plan.

With 3 years of project management work in local government under my belt, I was able to channel my inner project manager in order to create the plan. I was able to create a spreadsheet with drop down lists, tables, and rows including genre of text, points of interests and themes. I knew that looking through 200+ texts on a very limited budget and time was impossible. I had to focus my attention on certain texts. The easiest way and most sensible way to achieve this was through a set time period. I decided to focus on novels of the AWS written between 1965-1985. This was because the majority of African nations had achieved independence from their colonisers by 1965, meaning that texts within this period were a perfect fit for my research as they were written at the start of the ‘postcolonial’ era. This then limited the number of texts I needed to find and read.

The next issue I had to tackle was the inclusion of female authors. As I mentioned earlier, the AWS was a male-dominated series with only a handful of female writers. With my research topic in mind, I wanted to include as many female writers as possible that wrote within the time period outlined. I also had to decide what level of popularity I wanted to include in my research. With the most well-known author of the series being Chinua Achebe, whose popular Things Fall Apart (1962) had gained so much acclaim and academic scholarship, I had to carefully think about the contribution my thesis would make to this already crowded field. The second option was to choose the less popular authors whose work had gone largely unnoticed. However, this ran the risk of my finished thesis being very descriptive as opposed to analytical as there would be little to no secondary critics to engage with. I decided to include a mixture of well-known and less known authors. With the well-known authors such as Achebe, Buchi Emecheta and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, I stayed clear of their most popular works and instead chose works with less popularity such as Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) by Achebe, The Joys of Motherhood (1980) by Emecheta and Devil on the Cross (1982) by Ngugi. This provided an opportunity for my research to make an original contribution whilst also able to engage with academic scholarship. With the less-known authors, I chose their most popular works (Xala (1976) by Sembene Ousmane), giving me the same advantages as the well-known authors.

Creating a spreadsheet made the whole process of selecting texts much easier. I could record the texts after my first reading, writing short summaries as well as key themes and points of interest that I found in the narratives. Initially, I also wanted to include various forms and genre of texts in my thesis. However, after reading some of the plays in the AWS, I could see that there was very little female presence in them. Although it is possible to write about the absence of women in postcolonial plays, I do not believe that it would help me uncover how women were represented in postcolonial literature of the AWS. I was still able to include other genres, outside of the novel in my final selection of texts. These included the epistolary novel So Long a Letter (1981) by Mariama Ba, two different short story collections, one by Achebe, Girls at War, and the other by Bessie Head. The Collector of Treasures (1977). I also included a collection of speeches and essays by Tom Mboya, The Challenge to Nationhood (1970). After searching for, obtaining, and reading over 50 poems, 23 short stories, 15 prose, 10 plays, 10 novels, and a collection of essays and speeches, I was able to choose the 7 texts that would shape my thesis.

After the choosing of my primary texts came the initial self-doubt. Did I make the right choice? Should I read more texts? Have I chosen the best texts for my thesis? Would I be able to answer my research questions through these texts? The doubt, however, did not last long as the busyness of my PhD pushed these questions to the back of my mind as I began to focus on planning and formulating an argument for my thesis. The whole process of searching for and finding my texts has given me greater confidence in my PhD, as I can go back to my spreadsheet and see my rationale and notes behind every decision I made. Uncertainty regarding my source selection no longer plays on my mind, the back or front, and with the recent completion of the first chapter of my thesis, I can confidently say that I made the right choices.

Khadija Koroma is a PhD researcher at the University of Leicester. Her research is focused on women in postcolonial nations, particularly on how African women are represented through the narratives of the Heinemann African Writers Series.

Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.

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