A Babylonian Touch

Susan Pedersen

  • ‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain between the Wars by Martin Pugh
    Bodley Head, 495 pp, £20.00, July 2008, ISBN 978 0 224 07698 2

The Left Book Club edition of The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 with a print run of more than forty thousand, had an inset of a dozen or so grainy photographs. They offered shocking visual confirmation of Orwell’s already shocking text. There were the bent figures scavenging for loose coal on slag heaps, the squashy-faced women and children crowded into damp basements, the cloth-capped unemployed men leaning against lampposts. These are the canonical images of the 1930s: seemingly a ‘devil’s decade’ of economic collapse and supine politics on which a revitalised postwar democracy resolutely turned its back.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

Vol. 30 No. 21 · 6 November 2008 » Susan Pedersen » A Babylonian Touch (print version)
Pages 21-22 | 2853 words