Alwyn Turner – A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

This event is now sold out, please join the waiting list for any returned tickets, or we think you might like: Vernon Bogdanor & Andy Beckett. The Hub @ St Mary’s 22 March

From Times Book of the Year writer and historian, Alwyn Turner

The Great War left Britain shattered and the years that followed were wracked by crises: the Spanish Flu, the General Strike, the Depression, the Abdication. In these confused times, people looked for meaning in the oddest places – Spiritualism and Stonehenge enjoyed renewed popularity, newspaper horoscopes were invented, and strange phenomena observed, from Tutankhamun’s Curse to ‘Nessie’ and the Cottingley Fairies.

It was also a time of escapism – the Jazz Age, the birth of the BBC, Bertie Wooster and Hercule Poirot, Gracie Fields and Ivor Novello, of greyhound racing and Butlin’s. As George Formby sang, ‘It’s turned out nice again.’ Perhaps the most striking feature of the time is not what happened, but what didn’t happen. Even as countries across Europe fell to dictatorship, Britain remained immune to extremist politics.

Alwyn Turner is a writer and historian who teaches at the University of Chichester. He is best-known for his chronicles of twentieth-century Britain, which take in political, cultural and social history, and for his studies of British culture, from the Daleks to the Biba boutique, and from the Last Post bugle call to the early days of rock ’n’ roll and glam rock. A Shellshocked Nation follows his earlier Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, which was a Times Book of the Year. He spent his teenage years in Lichfield, where his father was a musician in the Staffordshire Regiment.