The Book Club: a literary history of Britain

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2019

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s Spectator Book Club, Sam's guest is Christopher Tugendhat, whose new book offers a refreshing and thought-provoking survey of twentieth-century history; not through wars and treaties and policies, but through the pages of the books from his extensive private library. In A History of Britain Through Books: 1900-1964, Christopher argues that we can get a special understanding the temper of a given time through the pivotal works of fiction and nonfiction that expressed it; books written without the historian's hindsight. Here’s a survey of familiar landmarks — as well as texts that have fallen into undeserving (and sometimes deserving) obscurity.

The Spectator Book Club, what used to be known as Spectator Books, is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.5	Hello and welcome to the Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,
0:25.7	and this week I'm joined by Lord Tuggenhardt, Christopher Tuggenhardt, who's a former European commissioner,
0:32.7	former conservative politician and journalist, and he's now the author of a book in which he looks back on,
0:39.0	well, 64 years of Britain, a history of Britain through books, his book's called 1900 to
0:44.6	1964. Christopher, welcome.
0:46.7	Thank you.
0:47.8	To start with, can you just, the most basic terms, sort of set out what this project is?
0:52.3	Why did you choose to the dates you chose and how did you
0:56.6	consider it? To take the dates first, my view is that basically the world changed in the early
1:05.8	1960s. You had the end of empire on the one hand, you had the rise of Commonwealth immigration on the other.
1:13.9	You had the change in sexual mores, Philip Larkin's famous remarks about sex began in 1963 between the Lady Chatterley trial and the Beatles' first LP.
1:26.2	I've probably not got it right.
1:27.7	You had the change in sexual noise.
1:30.3	You had the beginning of the affluent society.
1:33.9	You had the end of national service.
1:38.5	And, you know, two million men, of whom I was one, did national service.
1:43.4	But when national service ended, you still had
1:46.5	veterans from the Boer War, the First War, the Second War, the Korean War, you had the majority
1:53.7	of British men had all shared an experience, and that's something which will probably never be reproduced. So in all kinds of ways,
	...

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