<i>Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London</i>, by Judith R. Walkowitz.

Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London, by Judith R. Walkowitz. New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2012. xiv, 414 pp. $40.00 US (cloth). In Nights Out, Judith Walkowitz explores the Soho area of London between 1890 and 1945, vividly illuminating it as a world of immigrants, political dissidents, theatrical and musical performers, gangsters, prostitutes, reformers, and avid male and female consumers from all classes, who operated within and alongside the ever-expanding commercial cultures that included variety theatres, restaurants, street markets, and nightclubs. In so doing, she seeks to answer a scholarly call for localized and historically specific studies of the meanings and practices of cosmopolitanism, and argues for Soho's role as a potent incubator of metropolitan change (p. 3), leading the city and nation onward along the path to heterogeneity and modernity. book draws upon a rich and diverse source base of memoirs, travel guides, novels, newspapers, police reports, and oral histories to reveal Soho as a space for cross-class, multi-ethnic, and interracial interaction and sociability; for the policing and challenging of boundaries of gender, sexuality, and bodily display; and for political expression and conflict. It is an ambitious and highly readable account, which bridges and expands numerous historiographies, from the burgeoning scholarship on commercial leisure, to histories of British multiculturalism, to ongoing debates about the British experience of the Second World War. One of the particular strengths of Nights Out is its contribution to a growing body of scholarship that situates the development of British culture within global (rather than merely imperial) networks of cultural exchange. Soho's cosmopolitanism arose not only from its position as a neighbourhood within the imperial capital, but from its longstanding history as a home to immigrants from the European continent and its connection to expanding Anglo-American commercial entertainment industries. In two early chapters, Walkowitz reads the 1890's anti-vice campaign against the Empire Theatre of Varieties and the sensation caused by North American dancer Maud Allan's performances at the Palace Theatre in 1908 in a transatlantic frame. She shows that feminist purity reformers drew upon hybridized Anglo-American ideas about virtue during the Battle for the Empire, while Allan's original dance, the Vision of Salome, positioned her outside a single national framework (p. 69), drawing on contemporary ideas about the Orient, but also American styles of modern dance and physical culture. Then turning eastward to the European continent, in a chapter entitled The Italian Restaurant, Walkowitz skilfully weaves together the biographies of two Italian immigrants to Soho, restaurateur Peppino Leoni and market-owner Emidio Recchioni, to illustrate the strong influence of continental cuisine within British culinary culture in this period, but also Soho's important position vis-a-vis contemporary European political transformations. Soho catering industry became a vital enclave for supporters (like Leoni) of Mussolini's fascists in the Italian diaspora, while at the same time, a smaller group of Italian anti-fascists like Recchioni used their Soho storefronts as bases from which they could forge alliances within a transnational group of leftist political activists. …

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