A Shellshocked Nation

Excellent … A bottom-up, sharp and often surprising read – Andrew Marr * New Statesman *
Alwyn Turner is the master of funny, engaging social history * Sunday Times *
An enjoyable read, authoritative but full of funny stories … Turner is brilliant at ferreting out telling details and shiny anecdotes – Robbie Millen * The Times *
Intelligent and entertaining … much more interested in the lives of everyday people than high politics or highbrow culture – ‘Best History’ in Summer Reading * Sunday Times *
History at its most fun, immersive, human and revelatory … I wish I’d had a history teacher like Turner, with his idiosyncratic gift for wit and tenderness – Juliet Nicolson * Spectator *
A Shellshocked Nation is synoptic and ­panoramic, with everything that occurred in any field between 1918 and 1939 crammed in * Daily Mail *
Witty and wide-ranging … [Turner] has a great eye for when high culture collides with popular culture … Turner is superb at hunting down fascinating nuggets, telling quotes and lively trivia that capture the everyday reality of Britain * The Times *
[Turner is] always entertainingly brilliant – Marina Hyde * Guardian *
A panoptic survey of interwar Britain … Turner’s book, stacked high with surprises and eye-catching details, is a long tale of light and shade that rarely flags * Observer *
Turner writes neatly and convincingly when letting rip on his special subjects - music, variety, sport … He has a sharp eye * Private Eye *
Impressive * Church Times *
A gleaming gem of a book * The Oldie *
Fascinating * Camden New Journal *
Alwyn Turner’s writing on social history is unparalleled – Blackwells
It is newness, a particularly relentless kind, that emerges as the strongest thread in Turner’s history of the two decades that separated the First and Second World Wars. As with his earlier books, including histories of Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, the author makes his argument by painstakingly assembling a mosaic of the sorts of (often delicious) details that other writers might have ignored * TLS *
What a superb book! Every page said something interesting, strange or funny – Simon Winder
An admirable analysis of this most misunderstood - yet most relevant - period of British history – Simon Jenkins
Britain in the 1920s and 1930s pops to life in this often very witty chronicle of that jittery time – ‘Books to Look Out For in 2026’ * The Times *
The author makes his argument by painstakingly assembling a mosaic of the sorts of (often delicious) details that other writers might have ignored * TLS *
This is just glorious: almost every page stops you dead with insight into a world at once utterly strange, yet still living somewhere within us all – James Hawes, author * The Shortest History of England *
A wide-ranging account of a nation coming to terms with the most devastating war in the history of Britain, which includes the major episodes of those years as well as the smaller human details which enlivens the book – Juliet Gardiner, author of The Thirties: An Intimate History
A sparkling account of popular culture in Britain between the wars, embracing Gracie Fields and George Formby as well as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – Sir Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government, King’s College, London
This is both enjoyable and moving. Alwyn Turner has a knack for digging beneath the official historical record and extracting the flavour and texture of real life in the early twentieth century. In A Shellshocked Nation he draws on popular culture to show how a nation shocked, maddened and silenced by grief dealt with the traumatic efforts of one war and the build-up to the next – Lucy Lethbridge, author * Tourists: How the British went Abroad *

Alwyn Turner is a historian and writer who teaches at the University of Chichester. He is best known for his histories of twentieth-century Britain. All in it Together was a Sunday Times Book of the Year, and his last book, Little Englanders, was a Times History Book of the Year.

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