HISTORY
The Strange History of Our National Imagination
The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the Jackson; World, and Dominic Might Sandbrook;Do Tom So Holland;Again Tom Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance Robert Gildea; Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire Roger Crowley; Red: A Natural History of the Redhead Jacky Colliss Harvey; The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s 1932–1943 edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky; Willoughbyland: England’s Lost Colony Matthew Parker
Dominic Sandbrook (Allen Lane, 688pp, £25, Oldie price £20)
THE AUTHOR of a series of books about postwar British social history, Sandbrook is ‘a fogey with an excellent feel for the contemporary pulse and the surprising killer detail’, who ‘often argues that supposedly radical shifts in British culture mask a deep conservatism, and that we remain heavily in debt to the Victorians’. So wrote Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard. In his latest book, Curtis noted, Sandbrook ‘indulges some wonderfully counterintuitive preferences — for Black Sabbath, Grand Theft Auto (the most successful entertainment product ever, sales-wise), John Wyndham, the Flashman novels, The Avengers and The
Prisoner, all of which he writes about lovingly and well’. He also gives John Lennon and Yoko Ono ‘a righteous kicking’. But ‘any book of such massive sweep is doomed to be at best a partial failure, however witty and well researched’. Most critics agreed.
The Spectator’s reviewer, Thomas W Hodgkinson, started with three paragraphs of questions Sandbrook ‘fails to raise, or raises but fails to answer, or at least fails to answer properly in his otherwise very pleasant and intelligent tour of recent popular culture’. In the Sunday Times, Daisy Goodwin thought that ‘while his scope is catholic, it is a stretch to call it British: the subject matter of his book is almost exclusively English, and middle English at that.’ And Ekow Eshun, in the Independent, noted that the identity of modern Britain ‘is shaped as much by the margins as the mainstream’ and ‘by the contribution of the children of empire’, although ‘you wouldn’t know it from reading The Great British Dream Fac
tory’, because ‘in Sandbrook’s formulation, the history of our national culture is a linear one that runs in a straight line from imperial past to a curiously homogeneous present’.