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35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life after the catastrophe, July 2, 2010
In Virginia Woolf's MRS DALLOWAY, the character of Peter Walsh decides that the few years immediately after the Great War were "somehow very important"; Juliet Nicholson's powerful new cultural history of Great Britain during the period from 1918 to 1920, remind us just how very important that period was. Nicholson's method is to center her study around the lives of thirty-some figures, ranging from royalty and the aristocracy to figures important in the arts and the military, and even the working class. Her style seems initially meandering but as you get the hang of it you see the deeper patterns underneath, as she cleverly structures these figures' lives around the nation's major milestones in articulating the meaning of the War to End All Wars, where one in seven British men of the age of service died. Her choices for her dramatis personae are terrific, and often surprising: we don't hear that much about the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey, or even about her grandparents Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, for example (though those very familiar figures are all in here nonetheless), but rather quite a bit about the great memoirist Vera Brittain and the novelist Winifred Holtby. And most of the stories here have been rarely (if ever) fully told, and yet are of crucial interest to anyone interested in modernism or the InterWar period and here told with great skill: the first graduation of women from Oxford; the sensational glorification by Lowell Thomas of the exploits of T.E. Lawrence after Lawrence's exploits in Arabia and the Middle East but before the publication of THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM; the selling and destruction of Devonshire House, which formed the model for the similar fate of Marchmain House in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED; and, most crucial of all, the decision to set two minutes' observation of silence throughout the Empire on Remembrance Day.
There is material here for modernist and twentieth-century scholars to mine for years to come. The book reminded me of nothing so much as the excellent histories of the war itself by Paul Fussell (THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY) and Samuel Hynes (A WAR IMAGINED) from decades previous, which speaks impressively of Nicholson's achievement. There are a few minor errors here and there that I hope will be cleaned up for the US paperback (for example, Katherine Mansfield is described here as a "novelist"), but this well-crafted, beautifully detailed study is exceptionally rich with golden historical and cultural ore. It has been a bit oddly marketed for its publication in the USA (the cover photograph doesn't seem to give you much of a sense of the weightiness of the book's subject), but this fine study should absolutely find its audience among those who study or are captivated by the modernist period.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's The Little Things, July 6, 2010
Much history taught in public schools is macro-history, with pupils required to remember names, dates, places, important events and of course, important people. That became the fashion likely because of the constraints of time. There is so much students must learn that concentration on the details is left for specialty classes at University. But what is it that really shapes a nation's destiny and forms it's national character? Well, it's the little things that do that and when you study them you can better understand the trajectory of a country's history.
I happen to enjoy the details of history and so was delighted to read Juliet Nicolson's fine social history of Great Britain covering the two years immediately following the end of WWI. Since wars are massively disruptive, their end generally entails massive social and economic changes for both the victor and the vanquished. Most reasonably well-educated Americans know about the economic and social upheavals that took place in Germany, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Austria-Hungary following the First World War. Fewer know much about the effects of the war on Great Britain with many assuming that as the victor, it emerged relatively unscathed except for its battlefield losses.
Well, in The Great Silence, Nicolson puts the lie to that notion. Using anecdote, she shows how the war affected all classes of British society from the humblest servants all the way up to the royal family. And it did change them all. But it wasn't all negative. There were many great advances not just socially, but also in science and in technology which resulted in a more restless, but ultimately a freer and slightly less class-ridden society. One of the most fascinating chapters in my view is how surgeon Howard Gillies reconstructed the faces of men who had been shattered in the war giving many of them back the opportunity to lead productive lives.
The author often alludes to social changes that many at the time thought presaged the breakdown of morality. Women entering the workforce by the millions, a decrease in church membership and attendance, more open sexuality including that of the homosexual variety, an increase in the use of contraception, an increase in drug and alcohol abuse, and a less kowtowing attitude by the lower classes toward the gentry. There was also a more militant attitude among the working classes; in places that attitude was openly and avowedly Marxist.
I personally don't care much about some of the gentry I am introduced to in this book, but yet what they did and what they thought still mattered a great deal in the Great Britain of that time and so had a bearing on the eventual direction of the country. And not just the political direction but the cultural direction as well.
I like the way Nicolson has chosen to bracket the period she covers between the anger and uncertainty that enveloped the country at war's end and the national catharsis occasioned by the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. Every segment of society was included in that ceremonial event and it brought king and commoner together, if only briefly, in a way which gave the nation closure and allowed it to move forward.
If you enjoy reading about the minutiae that are the building blocks of the Big Picture, then I highly recommend this well-written and fascinating book.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely well written social history..., January 29, 2010
This review is from: The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War (Hardcover)
The Great Silence" is Juliet Nicholson's second book, after publishing "The Perfect Summer" in 2007. The first book was a social history of that glorious summer of 1911, the first summer after the ending of the Victorian and Edwardian ages.
With "Silence", Nicholson has returned with a meticulously written view of the two years in England after the end of "The Great War" in 1918. British soldiers returned after demob to their homes but in many cases, their lives would never be the same after four years in the trenches in France. So many men - who had marched gaily off to war in 1914 - had been killed or badly wounded, both in body and in spirit. So many women lost their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers. An entire generation of young men were decimated in the four years of war.
Nicholson writes about all strata of British society, both "above" stairs and "below" stairs. Some of the people she interviewed were children in 1919 and are alive today. She also relied on written histories, both personal and academic. All together, Nicholson takes the reader back to that two year post-war period that saw the beginnings of the "Roaring '20's" with a national obsession for dancing and drinking by all levels of society. She also writes about the toll the "Spanish Flu" had on those at home who caught it from returning soldiers.
Nicholson is a very good and controlled writer. This book is not yet available in the States and I had to order it from Amazon/UK. It is a wonderful look at a very interesting time in British society.
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