The Long Week End

MACMILLAN

THE witty title is promptly construed by the subtitle, ‘A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939,’ and this in turn by the opening sentence: ‘This book is intended to serve as a reliable record of what took place, of a forgettable sort, during the twenty-one-year interval between two great European wars.’ Being a record of things of a forgettable sort, it deals first of all with the fashions that dominated the day-to-day social life of England (but more particularly of London) from the Armistice of 1918 to the RussoGerman pact of 1939—fashions in dress, diversion, domestic architecture, interior decoration; fashions in journalism, politics, religion, morals; fashions in literature, painting, plays, movies, broadcasting, advertising, popular songs, practical jokes, stunts, sensations, headlines. Not too topical or trivial for the authors’ purpose are such matters as the Lambeth Walk, the Loch Ness monster, nudism, neon lights, the uses of cellophane, the popularization of the slide fastener, even the pogo-stick; and not too weighty or controversial are the general strike of 1926, the Amritsar massacre, the abdication of Edward VIII, the Munich Agreement. Some of the reminders of easily forgettable political facts are salutary: e.g., that Britons who raged against the Red puppet government set up by the Russians in Finland in 1939 had themselves helped to organize a Finnish Red Legion against Mannerheim in 1919. The total picture drawn is of a civilization cutting irresponsible capers for two decades on the edge of a precipice. The twentysix chapters will be widely received as a brilliant example of the saving British talent for selfcriticism. Brilliant they are; but a reader here and there will ask himself if their persistent bright mockery of transient follies and fatuities is not a little excessive for the times, and if the two gifted pens have not themselves fallen into the compromise that they find in ‘the whole fashion-sense of the Thirties’ — to wit, the compromise between what is ‘amusing’ and what is ‘functional.’

W. F.