Richard Overy

They Tried; They Failed

The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933

By

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.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The erecting and immediate destruction of a series of straw men rather detracts from what is for the most part an… ,
    • RT : A magnificent demolition job on this "acid laced tirade...unpleasantly self-obsessed...self pitying polemic...book… ,
    • 'Seventy years on, the time we have left to gather such first-hand testimony is running out.' John Keay on the sig… ,
    • The author 'seethes with contemptuous indignation at the shiny junk that an unregulated construction industry dumps… ,
    • 'The physical courage he demonstrated as a young man [...] gave way to intellectual power; radical thought, gifted… ,
    • 'While Jane Austen didn’t perhaps achieve the full recognition that she deserved in her lifetime, even then she out… ,
    • 'All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And t… ,
    Follow Us