Don’t mention the war!
Alwyn Turner is our finest cultural and social historian. His focus is typically on the lived experience of the people, rather than the Sunday papers’ idea of culture or the minutiae of the Westminster Village. He once argued with us that Middle of the Road were a culturally more significant band than Pink Floyd. And he can make the case.
Two years ago Alwyn published Little Englanders – a dazzling account of the Edwardian era. A Shellshocked Nation is a companion to that book. Alwyn picks up in the strange and rather sad period between the horror of the Great War and the apocalypse of the return leg twenty years later.
But while Britain was traumatised by the carnage of the Great War, and in due course came to be obsessed with Adolf Hitler, there were plenty of more immediate, home-grown events and concerns. The General Strike, the Abdication crisis, the coming of the BBC and a febrile changing of the guard in electoral politics, to name just a few. But if there is a theme to this volume it is a slightly patriotic wonder that while much of Europe was lurching into fascism, Britain never lost her head. There was never any real danger that the nation would succumb to extremism of the left or the right.
Alwyn Turner – Profile Books – £25.00
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Senator Burton K Wheeler put the question best: If the war in Europe was America’s war, why was she not fighting it? It was the vital question of its day. Should America join the European war or not?
No Man’s Land is already littered with books on the Great War, and there will be many more hurled into the fray, but not many of them will be as original as this thoughtful and engaging treatment by the historian 
