Dimensions
156 x 234 x 25mm
A Popular Social History Over the Past 50 Years Through the Nation's Best-Selling Books.
From literary classic to cookery books, blockbuster airport novels to self-help manuals, 'Reading The Decades' is a portrait of Britain through the books that have inspired, excited and forced us to part with our cash from the 1950s to the present day.
Through each decade John Sutherland highlights the major political, social and cultural events, and focuses on the bestselling books to reinvoke the sentiments of the period, from fashion and film to politics and propaganda, and from the desires and aspirations to the fears and anxieties of the British people.
In the 1950s, as the Cold War intensified John Benyon captured the mood with his science fiction of people struggling to cope with catastrophic situations. Yet, amid the food rationing of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Elizabeth David, a precursor of today's celebrity chefs, published the first of her bestselling books when the nation could only dream of new foods and flavours. Meanwhile, as some commentators voiced their fears of dumbing down in the 1990s, on the cusp of the 21st century history became a bestselling subject with works by Simon Schama, Peter Ackroyd and David Starkey among others.
As Sutherland explores the bestsellers of the later twentieth century a rich and compelling picture emerges. of bestselling books themselves, and, through our reading choices, greater movements of the time and how we have responded to them.
