Andrew Marr is a Cambridge graduate who has produced several historical documentaries for the BBC. This book is an accompanying volume to his series on modern English history. The book,however, stands alone as a fine piece of scholarship told in an understandable way. The 451 page book travels from the end of the Victorian Age in 1901 to the end of World War II in 1945. This period was a time of great change as Britain moved from the world's largest colonial power to a modern democracy living in the shadow of the behemoth might of the burgeoning American empire.
Marr has the knack of combining colorful anecdotes of the famous men and women who flourished in this era to a study of the movies, music halls, flight and transportation, politics and scandal. He covers everything under the Union Jack sun from organic foods, the rise of Mosley's Fascist party, the zaniness of Chaplin on film, the dotty Mitford girls to nightclubs, the birth of the BBC, popular music to the literary giants of the age. (Virginia Woolf; James Joyce: Ezra Pound; T.S. Eliot; the World War I poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon) to such British eccentrics as Ottoline Morrell. The Womens Suffragete movement led by the Pankhurst family is given good coverage. We also sit in at cabinet meetings looking over the shoulders of such figures as a gaggle of prime ministers: Winston Churchill the greatest Brit of all; Neville Chamberlain the failed appeaser of Munich infamy; Campbell-Bannermann; the stolid Stanley Baldwin and playboy Herbert Asquith who failed to lead the nation in World War I being replaced by David Lloyd-George the charismatic womanizing Welshman.
Marr does a good job in covering the horrors of both World War I and World War II in short but cogent chapters. Britain lost over 750,000 dead troops in the Great War and over 60,000 civilian deaths in World War II as well as many who died for King and Country. Marr describes the reigns of Edward VII; George V: Edward VIII (abdicated after wedding Mrs. Simpson and ruling only for ten months): George VI who was a good king during wartime hardships.
The book is written in a journalistic you are there style rich in quotable quotes. A sampling:
"As now, the middle classes looked to science to make life easier..."-p. 5
"One hint of greatness is when a person attracts phrase-makers."-p. 26
On World War I: "This was the first war to touch almost everyone in Britain since the brutal civil wars of the seventeenth century. It had vastly more impact on the homes of the British than the wars against Napoleon or the imperial wars."-p. 121
"Churchill...was always physically brave."-p. 168
"These were the years when,despite every temptation, we kept our balance."-p. 205
"Britain in 1920 was closer to being a democracy than ever before..."-p. 224
"As chancellor, Churchill immediately had to confront the ugly truths about British power which were still hiden under the imperial gloss."-p. 237
On the growth of the paperback book industry: "There were many revolutionary things about Penguins:they were cheap, well printed and little larger than a cigarette packet."-p. 278
"Yet when it came to Germany,Churchill was early and Churchill was right and Churchill was utterly dogged."p. 328
"Modern Britain is our share of the reward."p.429
Marr's book is well illustrated and a useful biblography and footnotes adds to the reading pleasure of the reader. A good and vaulable addition to the British history bookshelf! Rule Britannia!
