A glimpse of half-forgotten history

[wombat_socho]

Virginia Postrel excerpts a section from Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain to illustrate just how glamorous Commander Bond was to Britons in the postwar era, an era marked by continuing hard times as the Empire began to disintegrate in the wake of the Second World War. It reminds one that Orwell didn't have to work his imagination too hard to come up with the dreary, damaged cityscapes of Airstrip One for 1984, because the reality wasn't too far from the vision at that point. I'm thinking I really ought to pick up Winder's book, at least from the library; in some ways, the twilight period of the British Empire is even more foreign to me than the Regency years, even though the Empire was finishing up the process of collapse when I was still a wee young wombat. (Instapundit)

Comments

[433.livejournal.com]

Looks like a neat book! I'll add it to my Christmas list!

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

I think you'll enjoy it a lot, judging from the extract in Postrel's blog.

[433.livejournal.com]

I'm always interested in things like that - differences in how today's audience sees things differently than the those who read/watched the media in its own time.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

*nods* I think this is an area of history that could use more exploration. Too many people tend to regard all the arts as if they'd been created yesterday and don't take the context of the times in which they'd actually been created into account. This leads to asshats complaining about Huckleberry Finn and similar obtuseness, but you knew that.