EDITOR’S CHOICE: A PANORAMIC NEW HISTORY BRILLIANTLY MIXES THE SEISMIC AND THE EVERYDAY
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While writing his masterpiece, Portrait of an Age, the historian G. M. Young came to apprehend that “the real, central theme of History is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening: in Philip Sidney’s phrase, ‘the affects, the whispering, the motions of the people.’” A historian will fulfill his promise, Young believed (he was quoting Frederic Maitland), only when “the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things, will have become thinkable once more.” I haven’t read a history book that comes closer to realizing Young’s ideal than David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain.
The first in a projected multivolume chronicle of the years from 1945 to 1979 called Tales of a New Jerusalem, this sparkling book—deeply and imaginatively researched, written with…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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