by Andrew Marr
Younghusband, Francis ref1
youth movement ref1
Zeppelins ref1, ref2, ref3
Zimmermann telegram ref1
Zinoviev letter ref1, ref2
Zulus ref1
Picture Acknowledgements
Section One
Page 1 – top: © Bettmann / Corbis. 2 – top: © Private collection / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Art Library; bottom: image courtesy of the estate of Graham Laidler / Punch. 3 - all: © Getty Images. 4 – top: © Mary Evans Picture Library; bottom: © Press Association Images. 5 – all: © Getty Images. 6 – top: © National Portrait Gallery London; bottom: © Blue Lantern Studio / Corbis. 7 – top: © National Portrait Gallery London; bottom: © Mary Evans Picture Library 8 – all: © Mary Evans Picture Library
Section Two
Page 1 – all: © Getty Images. 2 – top: © Getty Images; bottom: © Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Art Library. 3 – top: © Getty Images; bottom: © Bettmann / Corbis. 4 – top: © Getty Images; bottom: © Mary Evans Picture Library. 5 – © Mary Evans Picture Library. 6 – both: © Getty Images. 7 – top: © Getty Images; bottom: © Mary Evans Picture Library. 8 – top: © Mary Evans Picture Library; bottom, both: © Getty Images.
Section Three
Page 1 – both: © Kibbo Kift Foundation / Museum of London. 2 – top, both: © National Portrait Gallery, London; bottom: © Mary Evans Picture Library / Illustrated London News. 3 – all: © Getty Images. 4 – top: courtesy of the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent © Mirrorpix; bottom, both: © Getty Images. 5 – all: © Getty Images. 6 – image courtesy of The Advertising Archives. 7 – top: image courtesy of NRM – Pictorial Collection / Science & Society Picture Library; bottom: © Mary Evans Picture Library. 8 – top: © Mary Evans Picture Library; bottom: © Getty Images.
Section Four
Page 1 – both: © Getty Images. 2 – top: © Bettmann / Corbis; bottom: © Getty Images. 3 – both: © Getty Images. 4 – top, both: © Imperial War Museum, London; bottom: © Getty Images. 5 – top: © Getty Images; bottom: © Imperial War Museum, London. 6 – both: © Getty Images. 7 – both: © Getty Images. 8 – top: Bettmann / Corbis; bottom: © Getty Images.
Text Acknowledgements
The author and publisher would also like to thank the following for their kind permission to reproduce copyright material:
Angus Calder for The People’s War (Jonathan Cape, 1969).
The Estate of Winston Churchill for excerpts from his letters.
Reproduced by kind permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London.
The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli for Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence.
The Estate of Colin MacInnes for Sweet Saturday Night (© Colin MacInnes 1967).
Reproduced by kind permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London.
Robert K. Massie for Castles of Steel (Jonathan Cape).
Reproduced by kind permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
The Estate of J. B. Priestley for The Edwardians (© J. B. Priestley 1970).
Reproduced by kind permission of PFD (www.pfd.co.uk).
The Estate of George Sassoon for ‘Blighters’ and Diaries of Siegfried Sassoon (© Siegfried Sassoon).
Sony/ATV Music Publishing for ‘Livin’ in the Future’ lyrics (© Bruce Springsteen Music 2007).
The Estate of H. G Wells for Anticipations, Mankind in the Making and Ann Veronica.
Reproduced by kind permission of A P Watt Ltd.
The Estate of Virginia Woolf for The Diaries of Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press).
Reproduced by kind permission of the executors of the Virginia Woolf Estate and The Random House Group Ltd.
An eye for headlines and exuberant headwear from the first: Young Winston, war hero, 1899.
Lizzie Van Zyl: the effect, if not the intention, of Britain’s South African invention – the ‘concentration camp’.
The old world dies: Queen Victoria’s funeral cortège, 1901.
‘Pont’ of Punch, perhaps the greatest cartoonist of the thirties, sums up the entire message of this book in a few squiggled lines.
Radical Joe became the Great Imperialist. Once among the most famous, and infamous, men on the planet.
‘Edward the Caresser’: Bertie felt he had been a Victorian for quite long enough.
A strangely sinister man: Queen Victoria’s grandson, Kaiser Bill, doing his bit for world wildlife.
Awesome – and awesomely expensive: Britain’s ‘Dreadnought’ leads a naval flotilla in 1906.
Anti-free-trade propaganda. An economic argument that split Britain down the middle.
Working-class engineer and salesman toff: Royce and Rolls in the year of their great Silver Ghost, 1906.
It went like a silent silver bullet and still remains the world’s most valuable car.
Edith Nesbit: a wild, experimental private life.
Peter Pan: Edwardian children’s stories provide a key to the inner life of the era.
H. G. Wells: often silly, often wrong, but the most ambitious popular sage of the time.
Britain’s got talent: music hall was the Edwardian equivalent of popular television.
Very naughty and a national treasure: the great Marie Lloyd.
One of the forgotten greats: Little Tich in his prime.
The strange allure of speed: British pioneer skiers virtually invented the sport of downhill ski racing.
We’re off to the movies – well, some of us are. The Fred Karno vaudeville troupe, including Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, en route to America, 1910.
One of the most successful agitators: Ben Tillett addressing strikers in 1911.
The brutal reality: a suffragette prisoner being force-fed. Holloway Prison, 1909.
Sylvia Pankhurst in full flood in the East End, 1912.
The Pankhursts fighting to present a petition to the King, 1914.
A better poster than a warlord? Kitchener in 1915, shortly before he was lost at sea.
War hero, poet and protestor: Siegfried Sassoon.
The ‘Baby Killer’ looms over London. Zeppelins brought London’s first Blitz, now little remembered.
Unimaginable horror and courage: an early British trench attack, Flanders.
A Disunited Kingdom and a shocking political blunder: British troops subdue Dublin’s Easter Rising of 1916.
Belgium, 1918: British dead line the trench after the German breakthrough.
‘Gurgle, gurgle, fizz . . .’: the German Navy’s final two-fingered salute to Britain. Scapa Flow, the Orkneys, 1919.
The woman who dared to ask: Marie Stopes, who brought sexual knowledge to millions.
The original anti-sleaze campaigner who vanished into thin air. Was Victor Grayson murdered?
The smile of a jackal? Maundy Gregory was a slander-monger, influence-peddler and Lloyd George’s sinister middle-man for the sale of peerages.
From frolicking to marching: the original Kindred of the Kibbo Kift; and John Hargrave addressing a rally of his Greenshirts.
Lady Ottoline Morrell: flamboyant, big-hearted – and betrayed.
Garsington Manor, Ottoline’s paradise.
The Red Clydeside riots: police keeping the road clear during the Battle of George Square.
The studied personification of English calm; but Stanley Baldwin was slightly more interesting than he looked.
The King-Emperor who saw disaster ahead: George V at the helm, 1924.
The Queen of the Night: Kate Meyrick, centre, with friends at her Silver Slipper club after yet another spell in Holloway Prison, 1928.
Anorexic models, androgynous fashions: the twenties were not a different country.
Those small enough for you? Eric Gill, scandalous sculptor, and a modestly endowed Ariel in front of the new BBC headquarters, 1925.
A radical hero in his youth, remembered as a ninny later: Ramsay MacDonald in his prime, 1926.
‘The King was wearing enough for both of us’: Gandhi being ch
eered by Lancashire mill workers during his 1931 visit to Britain.
The voice of left-wing Britain and almost as popular a broadcaster as Winston himself: J. B. Priestley.
Scotland’s wildest son: Hugh MacDiarmid, poet and revolutionary.
Dreaming of better ways of living: an early advert for the newly mortgage-intoxicated society.
Paid holidays arrive at last in the 1930s. Billy Butlin offered a week’s holiday for a week’s wages.
Heels for the masses: the thirties were, for much of the country, the first years of mass consumerism.
Those extraordinary Mitfords (clockwise from bottom left): Nancy, Unity, Jessica, Diana; novelist, Nazi, Red and fascist pin-up.
Wallis with Edward: despite the trauma of the abdication crisis, she did Britain a favour by removing a worryingly pro-German King.
He never expected or wanted the Crown, but George VI proved a sensible and popular wartime monarch.
The original Little Hitler; but Oswald Mosley was more sniggered at by the British than followed or feared.
Members of the International Brigade returning to London after fighting alongside the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
Not a novel way of trying to breed aircraft, but a strange coupling from the golden age of air travel: an Imperial Airways ‘Mayo Composite’, 1938.
‘Say Appease’: Chamberlain and Hitler smiling for the camera during their September 1938 summit, when Britain gave all the ground.
Unity Mitford being returned to England after her attempted suicide when war was declared on Germany.
The horror we never faced: in 1939 gas attacks were particularly feared and carefully prepared for.
One of the biggest social experiments in British history: children being evacuated in January 1940.
Not ‘the Blitz’ but our many Blitzes. A family visits what remains of their house in Plymouth, May 1941.
Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring by Laura Knight. A new country, forged in fire.
Waiting for the invasion: a soldier at prayer in Westminster Abbey shortly after Dunkirk.
Spitfires flying high: down below them, for once, the British were better organized than the Germans.
Spin-masters behind him, Nazis ahead: Monty in North Africa in 1943. He was a celebrity general for a media age, but was mocked as well as lauded.
Bodies in the street after the allied firebombing of Dresden, February 1945.
War leader on the line: Churchill had a schoolboyish enthusiasm for gadgets. Here he tries an American walkie-talkie.
Rainbow Corner, Piccadilly, 1945, where American popular culturereally first invaded Britain. Eat your hearts out, Pilgrim Fathers