Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars

I met Roy Hattersley nearly twenty-five years ago in the marvellous old Hatchards bookshop on the Strand when both of us reached for the same copy of Julian Barnes's "A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters". Our subsequent conversation was bordered on the bland - I think that I said, "After you" and he muttered a brief "Thank you".
Despite this burgeoning friendship (reference to which was strangely omitted from his memoir "Who Goes Home) I had often felt that he tended to be unnecessarily long-winded when speaking on television or radio, even to the point of being a bit of a windbag.
However, there is son such problem when he puts pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). This book is remarkably lucid and gives a well-structured and surprisingly politically objective account of Britain during the years between the First and Second World Wars.
I found his chapter on the events leading up to the abdication of King Edward VIII particularly enlightening. it is difficult now to appreciate how alarming the constitutional crisis was at the time, and Hattersley captures the mood with great clarity. Similarly the economic crisis of 1931 is handled with great lucidity, rendering the detailed and convoluted transactions readily accessible to the non-specialist reader.
I particularly enjoyed his chapters on literary and culture developments during that period, including the explosion in numbers of people visiting the cinema (with over a billion cinema tickets being bought in Britain in 1938).
Hattersley has a particular ability to convey a lot of statistics unobtrusively and without causing the reader’s eyes to glaze over.
Although this book does not offer any startling new insights to the period I found it very enjoyable and informative. ( )

I agree with much of what eglinton said, and found the chapters on sport, art and the media generally more interesting than those on politics and world affairs. At times, the book read like a series of essays rather than a coherent whole, and my edition (2007) was dotted with date errors and references to notes that didn't exist. Worth reading for the good sections alone, but a curate's egg. ( )

Hattersley manages to cover this interesting period without his telling the story ever really catching fire. He's rather disdainful of the charismatic or leading figures like Lloyd George, Churcill, Gandhi, and so doesn't really manage to explain why they were influential. And the accounts of complex events like the financial crisis of 1931 leading to the rift in the Labour leadership, or the General Strike are not simplified enough to make them coherent stories - although they were admittedly hard to follow even for the participants at the time. The 'King's Matter' , however, Hattersley's description of Edward VIII's weakness and flight, is symapthetically explained and well told. And the book is well-researched, and no doubt reliable. But, for the most part, the book provides much less sense of the personalities and shape of those year's than AJP Taylor's entertaining and opinionated 'English History 1914-45'. ( )