Available in a paperback edition

The first of a projected four volumes which will provide a complete social history of Britain between 1945 and 1979, Austerity Britain is a multilayered account of a nation recovering from a costly victory and being transformed, mostly against its will, by an ambitious but paternalistic Labour government. ‘Almost implausibly entertaining,’ wrote Philip Hensher in the Spectator. ‘The fascination of this marvellous chronicle lies in Kynaston’s marshalling of individual voices to supplement the account of larger phenomena . . . he is wonderfully ready to include the individual touch . . . Kynaston’s rivetingly enjoyable book has a quality of glorious abundance and plenty.’

Ross McKibbin writes:

Austerity Britain is about almost everything. Politics, economics, industrial relations, foreign policy; but also food (the influence of Elizabeth David is probably overrated), fashion, sport, popular music, unpopular music, radio, the beginnings of television, the press and its readers, literature (high, middle and lowbrow), sex, housing and architects, leisure and holidays (he is very good on Butlins), men, women and their often fraught relationships. The range of sources is equally wide: newspapers, novels, social surveys, autobiographies, biographies, films, public records – archival and printed – above all, the huge Mass-Observation archive. He has shown great pertinacity in hunting down sources unfamiliar to all except specialist historians. He has a sharp eye for issues like race, which in 1951 were no bigger than men’s hands, but were to change Britain as much as Attlee or Thatcher, and he usefully tracks the careers of individuals who typified the period.

(LRB 24 April 2008)

Available in a paperback edition

Bloomsbury | hardback |ISBN: 9780747579854