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• #OUR OWN CIVILIZATION BY C.E.M.JOAD PDF ARCHIVE#

#OUR OWN CIVILIZATION BY C.E.M.JOAD PDF ARCHIVE#

I would like to thank the archivists and librarians in all the many places I have visited over the past two years while researching the book, but I would like in particular to acknowledge the staff at the LSE Archive for their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness. I am also grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to quote from the work of T. I am glad to be able to thank Elizabeth al-Qadhi for allowing me to use the papers of her father, John Strachey. Eva Guggemos gave me assistance with the Lawrence and Wishart papers at Yale. I would also like to thank Verity Andrews and Brian Ryder for help in locating material in the Cape collection and the Allen & Unwin papers.

I am grateful to the Penguin Group for permission to use the Allen Lane archive at Bristol University and to Jean Rose for permission to quote from the files of Jonathan Cape in the Reading University Special Collections. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Vyvyan and Piers Brendon, who were kind enough to put me up, often at a few days’ notice, for all my archive trips to Cambridge.

The following have been helpful in a variety of ways: Jeremy Black, Jane Caplan, Chris Clarke, Patricia Clavin, Claire Feehily, Lara Feigel, Eileen Gunn, Tom Hoy, Jonathan Moffatt, Martin Thomas, Andrew Thorpe, Alex Walsham. I am very grateful to Monika Baar, Claudia Baldoli, Kate Fisher, Tim Rees, Richard Toye and Frances Wilson for reading parts of the manuscript and offering me sound advice. These were viewed as the twilight years, prelude to a looming darkness.ĭuring the writing of the book I have amassed a large pile of intellectual and practical debts.

In some small way it may explain why students in the secure Cambridge of the late 1930s could contemplate the death of civilization in a country whose political and social system had proved almost impervious to the savage violence and upheavals that scarred the history of the rest of Europe, and from which Hobsbawm himself was an exile. The result is, I hope, an unexpected window on to the social, cultural and intellectual world of inter-war Britain. This book is an exploration of British society in the 1920s and 1930s while it wrestled sometimes fatalistically, sometimes with undisguised relish, with the menace of a new Dark Age. It is also very different from my own memories of life in Cambridge thirty years later in the late 1960s where, despite labouring under the shadow of the bomb and the threat of war in Europe during the second Czech crisis, students did not contemplate early extinction but preferred to listen to Leonard Cohen in rooms made mellow by too much smoke and cheap wine. This did strike me as surprising, and it runs against the drift of the memoirs, in which he argued that communists were less infected by pessimism than everyone else because of their confidence in the future. But I recall a conversation with him a few years ago, shortly before starting the research for this book, when he told me that he could remember a day in Cambridge in early 1939 when he and some friends discussed their sudden realization that very soon they might all of them be dead. In his recent memoirs, the historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked of the 1930s that ‘we lived in a time of crisis’. Overy opens a window into the mind of a generation-a generation with anxieties both very different from and yet surprisingly similar to those of our own today.” “History at its best…With elegance and erudition, Mr. A magnificent feat of scholarship: masterly, original, important, lucid, and often very funny.” Overy has shifted the terms of the entire debate about the inter-war years…. “Few contemporary historians have accomplished so much at such a high level as Richard Overy…. Magnificent…It’s a formidably researched, elegantly written thesis and tells us maybe more than we want to know about ourselves.” “It is hard to imagine anyone recording these times more exactly and more intelligently, or with greater insight and scholarship, than Overy has in this book.” “Eminently readable…a masterpiece of historical imagination…For anyone who wished to understand inter-war Britain, this book is essential reading.” “Thought-provoking and illuminating…Overy’s study of British culture between the wars is absorbing and unexpectedly moving.”