Jerry White
They Cornered the Market
Legacy: One Family, a Cup of Tea and the Company that Took on the World
By Thomas Harding
William Heinemann 561pp £25 order from our bookshop
What put the Great into Great Britain during those tempestuous years of the 20th century when this country was fighting two of the bloodiest wars the world had ever seen? Well, pretty high up the list would be Lyons Corner Houses, Lyons teashops, Lyons cakes and fruit pies, Lyons Green and Red Label tea and Lyons Maid ice cream. The British marched on their stomachs and Lyons filled them for three generations. The company seemed so British, yet it was so European too: J Lyons & Co was the creation of Monte Gluckstein (1854–1922), the son of German-Jewish immigrants who had come to Britain via Holland and Belgium.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
This 'jaunty narrative raises fundamental questions about the role of popular history. Should this just be a matter of telling tales, as the general public often seems to think?'
@DrLRoach weighs up Charles Spencer's account of the White Ship Disaster.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/wholl-take-the-helm
'Amis clearly belongs to the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do school of pedagogy. More or less everything he says is demonstrably contradicted by elements of his own work, be they here or elsewhere.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/never-without-a-hitch
'The bar is set high at the outset, and readers are primed to wonder if Mikhail can make his case.'
Does Alan Mikhail's new life of the Sultan Selim I really overturn 'shibboleths that have held sway for a millennium'? Caroline Finkel investigates.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-of-the-universe-3