Recommendations from our site
“This book was published in June 1939, just before the start of the war. It’s all about the war looming over Britain and its effect on the people. It tells the story of a 45-year-old man called George Bowling. It’s a midlife crisis story…he decides to go back to his home town, Lower Binfield, as he has all these nostalgic memories of Edwardian Britain there, of meadows and fishing and beautiful girls who fancied him and good friends and all the things he feels are missing from his drudgery of a life. So he goes back and of course he finds the same thing he has found in London. Things are different and people have changed. He blames capitalism and progress. His nostalgia is destroyed…It’s all about the loss of that idyllic Britain, and loss of that perfect imagined England.” Read more...
In the novel Coming Up for Air, which he wrote just before the Second World War, there is an account of a left-wing meeting. The issues were different – Hitler and Stalin – but the description of the meeting, the sloganising, the emptiness of it, and his passion for saying to those of us on the left, ‘Let’s do better than this’, that is as relevant as it was several generations ago.
The best books on British Democracy recommended by Peter Kellner
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