Following Austerity Britain and Family Britain, the third and fulcrum volume in David Kynaston's landmark social history of post-war Britain
Following Austerity Britain and Family Britain, the third and fulcrum volume in David Kynaston's landmark social history of post-war Britain
David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written eighteen books, including The City of London (1994-2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and WG's Birthday Party, an account of the Gentleman v. Players match at Lord's in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain 1945-51 and Family Britain 1951-57, the first two titles in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945-1979) under the collective title 'Tales of a New Jerusalem'. He is currently a visiting professor at Kingston University.
Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face
*Hilary Mantel, Observer, Summer Reads*
The most ambitious and the most diligent ... These lists are
sometimes so extensive and artfully arranged that they acquire a
kind of lyrical beauty in their own right ... The guiding principle
of this method is not postmodern relativism but a generous and
open-minded inclusiveness ... As a rule, Kynaston shows enormous
self-restraint: he assembles and presents his material with such
studied neutrality that it’s not obvious, at first, where his own
loyalties lie ... If Kynaston’s Tales of a New Jerusalem helps us
to do that – if it succeeds in its objective of showing us, on a
scale both panoramic and intimate, exactly what the postwar
governments struggled to build, and which Thatcher, just as
determinedly, sought to dismantle – then it will surely come to be
seen not just as one of the present era’s most important histories,
but as one of the most illuminating works of literature
*Jonathan Coe, Prospect*
David Kynaston’s brilliant and witty chronicle of post-war Britain
shows why he’s The Past Master ... As wonderfully quick-witted and
wide-ranging as its predecessors ... Kynaston peppers his book with
these illuminating little vignettes ... I was struck by how
skilfully he weaves it all together, beautifully intertwining
anecdotes and observations with sparkling details and fascinating
statistics ... Modernity Britain is both even-handed and
exhilarating, a rare combination. Kynaston’s sympathies are,
broadly speaking, with the underdog, but he is wary of certainties,
distrustful of the pat remedy. When he expresses overt opinions,
they are always thoughtful, and arrive like thunder-flashes,
illuminating the pages around them ... Was ever a history book so
authoritative and, at the same time, quite so entertaining?
Kynaston is particularly brilliant at filleting contemporary books,
newspapers, comedy scripts, advertisement, films, political
speeches, etc, for the telling quotation
*Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday*
Kynaston’s many fans will be pleased to hear that Modernity Britain
has all the virtues of his previous volumes ... Kynaston has an
unrivalled eye for long-forgotten, apparently banal and yet weirdly
suggestive anecdotes ... Above all, Kynaston is a historian of
tremendous compassion ... Perhaps the most moving section of
Kynaston’s splendid book, though, is his discussion of British
schools in the late 1950s
*Dominic Sandbrook, The Times*
The entertainment flies off the pages. The Kynaston method of
compiling a vast array of sources and applying them with equal zest
to the momentous ... and the ephemeral ... guarantees a rattling
read. This is social, cultural and political history, more or less
in that order, with a smile on its face ... Mostly he launches
bombardments of facts, quotes, stories and numbers interspersed
with pithy and shrewd editorial observations. He more than gets
away with it ... There are brilliant passages throughout about the
dispersion of inner-city tenant dwellers ... Kynaston specialises
in fair-mindedness and nuance ... Much of the sheer and abundant
joy of this book are its serendipity ... Hundreds of other wonders
and absurdities captured and recreated for our enlightenment and
entertainment
*New Statesman*
From high-rise flats to the Carry On films, here are the
never-had-it-so-good years brought vividly to life by a historian
whose extraordinary appetite for research seems to know bounds
*Rachel Cooke, Observer*
Kynaston is a wonderful writer and his technique of creating a
collage of diary extracts, newspaper commentaries and personal
reminiscences, interspersed with historical description, acts to
subtly disguise the force of his own analysis
*The Times Book of the Week*
The narrative is beautifully composed and Kynaston digs deeper than
previous historians ... One of the great virtues of Kynaston’s
approach is the juxtaposition of political rhetoric and social
reality
*Literary Review*
Kynaston is the most readable and original social historian writing
today and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what his latest
compulsive book includes. Buy it
*Daily Express*
His forte is a beguiling use of social insights, often on an
intimate domestic scale, to establish a sense of period and to open
windows on the recent past
*Peter Clarke, Financial Times*
David Kynaston resembles a novelist impersonating a historian. His
books read like fiction disguised as documentary ... His method
evokes the sumptuous messiness of human experience. He depicts
history as an unfolding, ill-managed pageant ... His books so
enriching, improving and endearing ... Shrewd, funny and
ever-readable ... In Kynaston’s history books, the reader can hear
the people speak. He has an elocutionist’s sense of people’s
diction
*Guardian*
Artful deployment of different voices and sources vividly evokes a
time when benighted extremes of snobbery and hate-speech coexisted
with increasing working-class confidence
*Observer*
Kynaston is a historian who likes to get out of the way. You seldom
read a decisive judgment or a grand-sweeping generalisation.
Rather, he rummages in the attic and pulls a whole clattering
cavalcade of interesting junk down on himself ... Among his many
virtues are his thoroughness and attention to detail
*Sam Leith, Spectator*
Superb ... Modernity Britain is an outstanding book, a delightful
and often funny mix of the profound and the mundane that presents
an enormously instructive glimpse into a time when supermarkets,
Carry On films and Galaxy bars were cutting edge ... Kynaston
possesses unique sensitivity to their meaning
*Sunday Telegraph*
Wholly absorbing work
*Independent on Sunday*
Kynaston is brilliant and funny
*Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph*
His look behind the curtain and his detailing of the rich quotidian
details of the recent past says everything about how we live now
... The striking thing about Modernity Britain is the parallels
that Kynaston allows us to quickly draw
*Big Issue in Scotland*
Portrait of Britain on the verge of change in the late 1950s
*Sunday Times*
Wonderful history
*Daily Telegraph*
David Kynaston’s monumental history ... Kynaston shows, with his
customary finesse and kaleidoscopic range of sources
*Independent on Sunday*
Unrivalled eye for detail in this arresting portrait of Britain
*Sunday Times Summer Reads*
This is the latest volume in the historian’s acclaimed series about
Britain since 1945, Tales of a New Jerusalem. Focusing on the years
of Harold Macmillan’s first government, it echoes with the diverse
voices of 1950s Britain, from Surbiton house-wives (“Why should I
spend all morning making scones?”) to Enoch Powell’s nationalist
rhetoric. It is a shrewd, funny and ever-readable book
*Guardian Summer Reads*
Kynaston lingers on the cusp of two decades, delivering insights
into the nation’s mood as it eyed cultural, political, and
commercial change
*Mail on Sunday Summer Reads*
Epic series of post-war life ... Crams in such a mass of detail you
feel you’re living in “never had it so good” Britain
*Paul Routledge, Tablet*
The latest volume in what is becoming the essential history of
postwar Britain
*New Statesman*
David Kynaston is as much a poet as a historian of postwar Britain,
and he has an accurate eye for the detail on which poetry depends
... No other writer evokes Britain’s past so well
*Guardian*
He conveys 1950s life more vividly than any historian before him
... Masterful
*Economist*
David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain so I can read about Terylene and
Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pie under an alien sun
*Lucy Lethbridge, Observer, Summer Reads*
Praised by journalists to the skies ... A grand design ... David
Kynaston tells the story in his own measured words ... Kynaston has
researched widely into such sources and digests them into a
readable totality. If this is, in part, a scissors-and-past
project, it’s also one that stands on its own feet ... This is not
a novel. It is not a memoir, though it eats the memoirs of others,
plankton fashion. It is a species of history – annals, perhaps.
Kynaston’s far from copious political judgements are sensible and
considerate ... The book identifies a British modernity of snobbery
and privilege, but acknowledges exceptions and cross-currents
*London Review of Books*
Kynaston’s montage technique, which creates a palimpsest of private
and public sources, is once again deployed to great effect in this,
the fifth in a remarkable sequence of volumes that will eventually
cover the period from 1945 to 1979
*Standpoint*
This book is preceded by two two-volume books that have been
praised by journalists to the skies ... David Kynaston tells the
story in his own measured words, and he also tells it in the often
loud and uninhibited words of others ... Kynaston has researched
widely into such sources and digests them into a readable totality
... An affinity with the fiction of Antony Powell has been caught,
but this is not a novel. It is not a memoir, though it eats the
memoirs of others, plankton-fashion. It is a species of history –
annals, perhaps. Kynaston’s far from copious political judgements
are sensible and considerate
*Karl Miller, London Review of Books*
David Kynaston is a rare example of authorial effacement ... The
sources – mainly letters and diaries – are left to speak for
themselves. His work is suggestive rather than argumentative and
one assumes that applying the word “modernity” to the country that
Lawrence Durrell called “pudding island” is, at least in part,
ironic ... Rather than writing from the Olympian vantage-point of
the historian, Kynaston presents a succession of striking vignettes
... Kynaston is interested in the broad sweep of history
*Independent*
The latest instalment of his mammoth post-Second World War social
history ... Skilfully blends highbrow with humdrum ... Kynaston has
ranged widely in search of the spirit of the age, digging out local
newspapers, youth-club records and Mass Observation survey results.
All human life is here ... For those who recall Teddy Boys and the
Angry Young Men, Sputnik, hula hoops and Nimble loaves spread with
Blue Band margarine, Modernity Britain will be a swing-dance down
memory lane. Readers born later in the century will, nevertheless,
find themselves entranced by the narrative, which is as richly
textured as a tufted carpet and hums with energy like a Hoovermatic
twin-tub
*Country Life*
Kynaston’s latest volume looks at how the luxuries of modernity –
and its political bedfellows – swept the country in the late
1950s
*Independent, Beach Reads*
There are in fact two David Kynastons. One is the relatively
conventional historian who has given us solid and illuminating
accounts of the City of London, the Bank of England, the Financial
Times and much else. The other is the venturesome innovator engaged
in cutting up the rich history of post-war Britain into quite thin
slices, and retailing news stories and contemporary comments, often
on a day-by-day basis, to give the vivid flashback into how things
were, and were felt, at the time ... Applying his usual striking
technique, Kynaston places such life-changing trends in the context
of innumerable and contrasting contemporary incidents and comments,
remind us of what people had on their minds ... What of Kynaston’s
grand project as a whole? The first part of Modernity Britain and
its successor will see the story through to 1962 – the halfway mark
in Kynaston’s planned 32-year-long saga – so we may expect a final
total of 12 volumes. Some have compared it to The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, and it
certainly has affinities with Anthony Powell’s series of novels, A
Dance to the Music of Time. In any case, we can look forward to
more of a stimulating and refreshing achievement
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
David Kynaston’s technique as a historian is subtly immersive. His
magisterial Austerity Britain and Family Britain covered the years
from 1945 to 1957. This one proceeds only to 1959, and the election
that brought the young Margaret Thatcher to Parliament ...
Kynaston’s unobtrusive pen defers to the evidence he so
painstakingly gathers, from newspapers and books, dairies and
letters. The result is much more than a patchwork of period detail,
but the detail is irresistible
*Intelligent Life*
Kynaston is engaged on a massive project with the overarching title
Tales of a New Jerusalem, which aims to tell the story of Britain
from the end of the Second World War to the election of Margaret
Thatcher in an unspecified number of volumes
*Big Issue in Scotland*
Kynaston is engaged on a massive project ... Tales of a New
Jerusalem, which aims to tell the story of Britain from the end of
the Second World War
*Big Issue Cymru*
Most historians care to believe they are disinterested
truth-tellers, pretending that they don’t have a particular axe to
grind. They like to shape history into a certain pattern, whether
they are viewing it from the Left or the Right. Some favour heroes
and villains, others a sense of inevitability in worldly matters. A
few allow the reader the space and freedom in which to relish,
where it is due, the mysterious ordinariness of the past. David
Kynaston is of that rare number. His enthusiasm for the enduring
importance of trivia is among his many virtues as a chronicler of
British life in the postwar years. This riveting book is the fifth
in the sequence Tales of a New Jerusalem. Like its predecessors, it
assembles the great alongside the not-so-great, the talented next
to the clueless. Churchill is still around, but it’s Harold
Macmillan who now hogs the political limelight ... One of the
treasures the diligent David Kynaston has unearthed is the fact
that Cliff Richard was once considered “dangerous” ... Kynaston’s
histories are wide in scope and at times lyrical in conception. I
can’t wait for the next instalment
*Paul Bailey, Oldie*
When it is completed, Kynaston’s multi-volume history of modern
Britain will offer an unrivalled panoramic view of our country’s
social, cultural and political evolution between 1945 and 1979.
This latest instalment focuses on the key years at the end of the
1950s when people were finally learning to turn their backs on
austerity. His exhaustive trawl of sources, and his matchless gift
for blending the trivial with the profound, ensure no corner of the
national character is left unexplored
*Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday Books of the Year*
Modernity Britain … is the latest episode of David Kynaston’s
profoundly humane history of 20th-Century Britain. His past is not
another country inhabited by politicians and the famous. It is
peopled by those whose lives are shaped, like ours, as much by
food, music and weather as by wars and legislation
*New Statesman Books of the Year*
We often think of 1950s Britain as a land trapped in tea-shop
conservatism. But as Kynaston shows in the latest volume of his
splendid journey through post-war British history, the final years
of the decade could hardly have been more exciting … As always,
Kynaston has produced a dazzling tapestry of sources. What really
stands out, though, is his discussion of Britain’s schools: in
particular, the ordeal of the 11-plus, which meant the difference
between lifetime success and failure for millions of British
children
*Sunday Times Books of the Year*
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