What Britain owed to Gracie Fields

Simon Heffer is the supreme Stakhanovite among British writers. Where the original Stakhanov moved 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift, within the past decade Heffer has produced four massive volumes of modern British history, each little less than 1,000 pages. Alongside them he has edited three equally voluminous diaries of the waspish socialite MP ‘Chips’ Channon, as well as writing regular reviews and columns. Hats off to the master!

In this latest and final volume of his tetralogy chronicling the British century between Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 and Neville Chamberlain’s reluctant declaration of war on Germany in 1939, Heffer once more treats us to his vast knowledge and trenchant opinions on almost every aspect of the nation’s state, from high politics to crime and popular entertainment. It is an astonishing achievement of narrative history, and if it has an old-fashioned feel, it’s in the best sense of that phrase.

The author is a political animal with strong cultural interests, and while the bulk of this detailed work concerns the day-to-day struggle for control of the country at a crucial moment of change, he never neglects the parallel worlds of music and literature – devoting many pages, for example, to the fairly obscure writer Humbert Wolfe, and several more to one of his heroes, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Each volume of these histories has an overarching theme – the ‘arrogant swagger’ of the Edwardian era, for instance, masking a deep anxiety about the future of British power. The narrative arc of this book explores how the country was dragged kicking and screaming into fighting a second world war soon after the first had left a bereaved nation firmly wedded to pacifism.

Heffer peppers his prose with extracts from the diaries and letters of contemporary witnesses, including Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes and the eccentric novelist John Cowper Powys.