Family Britain, 1951-1957 - Couverture souple

I could quote forever from this magnificent book. Professor Kynaston is the most entertaining historian alive, and his Tales of a New Jerusalem, when concluded, will undoubtedly be the first stop for any reader interested in the vitality, rather than the general contours, of this long period. --The Spectator

Kynaston's book is a deeply textured tapestry of everyday life the day before yesterday, a collage of diaries and memoirs every bit as rich and rewarding as a great Victorian novel... Kynaston is a master of these kinds of stories, funny and touching by turns... Plenty of historians have written about it before. But none have captured it better or with more human sympathy than David Kynaston, in this deeply researched, richly detailed and very moving book. --The Telegraph

David Kynaston selects his words with the precise and evocative care of a Metaphysical poet exploring a new-found land... It is the great strength of Kynaston's almost Shakespearian approach to social history -- a vast canvas, huge detail, imaginative empathy and wise authorial neutrality -- that he allows one half of his readers to wallow comfortably in nostalgia while the other half shudders with relief that the 1950s are half a century behind us... On almost every page there is an arresting detail, statistic or quotation. --The Sunday Times

The second volume of David Kynaston's chronicle of postwar Britain has the virtues of the first - insight into the concerns of everyday people as well as those of their rulers.
--The Observer

`Marvellously entertaining' --Philip Hensher, Spectator Books of the Year

`Kynaston has dredged reminiscences, diaries, political archives, newspapers and magazines for every scrap of interest and detail.' --Joan Bakewell, Observer Books of the Year

`David Kynaston, in the brilliant second volume of his social history of Britain, has taken a microscope, and then a sharp scalpel, to that one-dimensional halcyon memory ... weaving an intricate tapestry of the national mood' --Ben Macintyre, Times

`With his second brick-sized volume, Family Britain 1951-57, David Kynaston magnificently continues his sociocultural history of postwar Britain, bringing my formative years into sharper focus on every page' --Philip French, Observer Books of the Year

`David Kynaston has done it again ... he has created a living, breathing, talking, singing, dancing, grumbling and complaining portrait of the British as they used to be'
--Literary Review

As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.