A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars – history at its most ‘human’

Alwyn Turner specialises in “bottom-up history – or, to be more precise, middle-up history”, said Robbie Millen in The Times. In his series of books on 20th-century Britain, his focus has been not so much on high politics as on “the ordinary, suburban and middlebrow”. In the latest, Turner sets out to “take the temperature” of the nation in the 20 years after the First World War. While he doesn’t ignore big events – the General Strike, the abdication crisis, the rise of the blackshirts – what preoccupies him is the “stuff of daily life”...