'Economic Recovery in Britain 1932-1939'

H. W. Richardson: Economic Recovery in Britain 1932–1939. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 63s.

The ’thirties in the popular imagination were years of severe economic stagnation. There was political and financial crisis in Europe, a National Government in England cutting unemployment benefits in the interests of the conventional ‘political economy’. The Abdication shook the imagination of newspaper readers as the Loch Ness Monster had in the earlier years. The world of John Betjeman, Noel Coward and the tired musical was more ‘real’ than the two million unemployed. The weakness of concentration on the political and social narrative without a serious attempt to analyse the economic and imperial substructure has been rightly castigated by Gareth Stedman Jones in his review of A. J. P. Taylor’s History of England 1914–1945 (nlr 36).