Richard Overy
They Tried; They Failed
The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933
By Zara Steiner
Oxford University Press 938pp £35 order from our bookshop
In 1940 the journalist and later Labour politician Michael Foot published a book on interwar Europe called Armistice 1918–1939, a title that did not quite do justice to his theme. As well as the slide to a new terrible war, Foot argued in his preface that the years after 1919 had offered ‘great hope besides’. Too much oppressed by the dark years of the 1930s, ‘we forget’, continued Foot, ‘the proud hopes and exertions of the ten which followed 1918’. That is really the theme of Zara Steiner’s magisterial international history of the 1920s. The postwar years were not, she insists, a fractious prelude to the grimmer 1930s but a time of hope, ‘when more doors opened than shut’.
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
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad