Simon Heffer
Tuesday 26th March 2024
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7.10pm
7.30pm
This spring we are looking forward to welcoming back historian and Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer for Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars.
Sing As We Go
Sing As We Go is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cultural history of the country from 1919 to 1939.
It explores and explains the politics of the period, and puts such moments of national turmoil as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936 under the microscope. It offers pen portraits of the era's most significant figures. It traces the changing face of Britain as cars made their first mass appearance, the suburbs sprawled, and radio and cinema became the means of mass entertainment. And it probes the deep divisions that split the nation: between the haves and have-nots, between warring ideological factions, and between those who promoted accommodation with fascism in Europe and those who bitterly opposed it.
'It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified to tell the story of the 1920s and 1930s . . . I can imagine Churchill admiring Heffer's genial approach. It is difficult for a reviewer to do the book justice . . . This is a superb book, and will surely be seen as the definitive history of the pre-war years.' - A. N. Wilson The Critic
About Simon Heffer
Simon Heffer read English at Cambridge and took a PhD in modern history at that university. His previous books include A Short History of Power, Simply English and High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain and Staring at God: Britain in the Great War. In a thirty-year career in Fleet Street, he has held senior editorial positions on The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and is now a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.