Austerity Britain 1945–51

Have just fin­ished this massive volume, 633 pages exclud­ing the notes. And I was fas­cin­ated by every page. It’s an immensely read­able, incred­ibly wide ran­ging, social his­tory of Bri­tain imme­di­ately after the Second World War. The period in which I was con­ceived and born and so many fea­tures of which I remem­ber from my early child­hood — I was 4 by the end of 1951.  Kyn­a­ston draws on lots of diar­ies of indi­vidu­als plus a lot of the vox pop records of Mass Obser­va­tion.  Accounts of the era of the first post war Labour gov­ern­ment are inter­spersed with the people’s view of their earn­est social­ist lead­ers.  I sup­pose the book could be char­ac­ter­ised as a pop­u­list skate across the period, but the breadth doesn’t get in the way of the under­stand­ing and ana­lysis of what was going on.  Quite brilliant.