Product Description

Bounded by the Great War on one side and by the looming shadow of the Second World War on the other, the inter-war period has characteristically been portrayed as a time of unremitting poverty, rising crime and mass unemployment. In Martin Pugh's lively and thought-provoking new book, however, the acclaimed historian vividly shows how the British people reacted to the privations of wartime by indulging in leisure and entertainment activities of all kinds - from dancing and cinema going to smoking, football pools and paid holidays. He explodes the myths of a nation of unwed women, revealing that in the 1930s the institution of marriage was reaching its heyday, and points to a rise in real incomes, improvements in diet and health and the spread of cheap luxuries. The result is an extraordinary, engaging work of history that presents us with a fresh perspective and brings out both the strangeness and the familiarity of this point in time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16891 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
`A wide-ranging study of a fascinating period, We Danced All Night is also a good reference book'

Review
'A fascinating detailed look at how we lived during the interwar years'

Review
`buoyant and brilliant'

Customer Reviews

Social History of the Twenties and Thirties
Martin Pugh has amassed a great deal of information about the attitudes and social mores of the ordinary people throughout Britain in the Twenties and Thirties and made it accessible and even enjoyable. The 'celebrities' such as the Duff-Coopers and the Mountbattens are there, but the strength of the book lies in the insights it gives into the lives of ordinary people going about their work and leisure. There is rigour as references are scrupulously given, but there is also an easy and friendly style which makes the 400 plus pages pass quite quickly.

sadly unreliable
This is no doubt a book full of interest and information, and will be a revelation to those whose view of the 1930s in Britain is limited to the Jarrow March and The Road to Wigan Pier. But readers have a right to expect that a popular history book written by an eminent academic (as Martin Pugh is described in the cover blurb) will be accurate and reliable. So when Pugh refers to "T S Eliot's famous description of the 1930s as a low dishonest decade", the reader should be able to trust this attribution. But it is wrong. The famous quote is from W H Auden's poem September 1939. So what? you may say. We all make mistakes. But this book is so full of misleading statements and dubious assertions that in the end it cannot be trusted. Is it really reasonable to describe British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley as "typical of men from his class and his generation"? Can we really believe that Vera Brittain's eccentric semi-detached marriage arrangements - which would strike most people as very odd even today - were 'symptomatic of a wider shift"? I read this book with declining faith in the author's factual accuracy and historical judgement. In the last chapter Pugh states that Chamberlain continued secretly to seek a negotiated peace with Hitler during the first nine months of WWII. Is this astonishing assertion really true? The trouble is, by the end of this book, I certainly couldn't believe it on Pugh's authority.

All great stuff
All great stuff. As some one who has lived through the thirties Matin Pugh brings it all back with remarkable clarity. A truly
remarkable book.