Outbreak of Pleasure

Angus Calder

• Now the war is over: A Social History of Britain 1945-51 by Paul Addison
  BBC/Cape, 223 pp, £10.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 563 20407 9
• England First and Last by Anthony Bailey
  Faber, 212 pp, £12.50, October 1985, ISBN 0 571 13587 0
• A World Still to Win: The Reconstruction of the Post-War Working Class by Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook
  Faber, 189 pp, £4.50, October 1985, ISBN 0 571 13701 6
• The Issue of War: States, Societies and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941-1945 by Christopher Thorne
  Hamish Hamilton, 364 pp, £15.00, April 1985, ISBN 0 241 10239 1
• The Hiroshima Maidens by Rodney Barker
  Viking, 240 pp, £9.95, July 1985, ISBN 0 670 80609 9
• Faces of Hiroshima: A Report by Anne Chisholm
  Cape, 182 pp, £9.95, August 1985, ISBN 0 224 02831 6
• End of Empire by Brain Lapping
  Granada, 560 pp, £14.95, March 1985, ISBN 0 246 11969 1
• Outposts by Simon Winchester
  Hodder, 317 pp, £12.95, October 1985, ISBN 0 340 33772 9

Towards the end of the Second World War, the Common Wealth Party produced a striking leaflet – ‘Again?’ – to play on the widespread fear among British voters that victory over Nazism was merely the prelude to a return to mass unemployment at home and continued international insecurity. The ‘old order’ had failed. A ‘new society’ was necessary. ‘The 60,000,000 colonial peoples, fighting against exploitation’, were ‘our allies in the struggle for a new society’ and must be given self-government at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, the war itself was ‘part of a world revolution of the common man, aimed at a new world of plenty and security’.