History – 430 pages – my copy (hardback; 2009) bought from Waterstones for reduced price of £8.99
- 4 nods
Since leaving his post as the BBC’s political chief, Andrew Marr has notched up a career as the historian and commentator of modern Britain. First came his book upon the post-war decades, from victory days of Churchill to the slump days of Brown. Fast following in its success is The Making of Modern Britain; from the death of Queen Victoria to the end of the Second World War.
It is a period heavily covered by historians and writers alike. The big challenge is in adding something new to a historical landscape that is hard to shift about: there are two world wars that, obviously, dominate any book on the period. So, it is with Marr’s history. Though the author pulls back from heavy detail, warning the reader on the opening parts of both wars that his is not an analytical, event by event study; rather a portrait of an age with quick snapshots of the regular, the irregular and the outstandingly strange.
But although his pulling up of interesting and forgotten facts keeps the book fresh, Marr never goes for the jugular in defining the age. His continuing theme is to make the connection with the reader that although the times were indeed different, it was in these decades that our own conception of Britain was forged. Yet apart from this, Marr is bereft of adding anything new as to our perception of the early twentieth century; something his predecessor book did achieve (notably in his critique of our consumerist shopping culture lording it in the modern age).
Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain is a book recommended to those not acquainted with the period in question; for those looking for a light to shine on decades that appear remote and confined to black and white.
