Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
David Kynaston
Bloomsbury 2009
This instalment of Kynaston’s social and political history of the country starts off where Austerity Britain left off, and it is just as good. In its 700 pages it creates a vivid picture of just six years, starting with the Festival of Britain and finishing with the aftermath of Suez, where Britain’s role in the world, in particular her long and painful retreat from super-powerdom, became ever more clearly defined. However, as in the previous volume, it is the lives of ordinary people that are to the fore. Once again, housing policy, this time with its emphasis on demolishing urban “slums” and replacing them with huge modernist, largely high-rise, developments, is explored in detail; however, we also learn much of social attitudes, in particular with relation to class and sexuality. It is fascinating to see the seeds of the world we live in now: the rise of consumerism, the cultivation of “the teenager” as an economic and cultural entity, the early rumblings of rock’n’roll, the devastating impact of television on communal living. At the same time, Britain then seems like a foreign country: a wide-spread sense of deference and “knowing one’s place”; strict delineation of men’s and women’s lives; active, almost lunatic, state-led fear and persecution of homosexuality; shocking casual racism. It’s a warts-and-all picture, culled largely from diaries, Mass Observation reports, letters, and biographies which, despite its length, keeps the reader’s interest throughout. The next volume, which will presumably take us up to Larkin‘s annus mirabilis”, 1963, is eagerly awaited.
14 August 2010
http://www.bloomsbury.com/authors/details.aspx?tpid=2758
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