Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars

Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars. Roy Hattersley. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]20.00. 454 pages. ISBN 978-0-316-73032-7. This history by Lord Hattersley, a minister in the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments, covers much the same ground as the middle part of A.J.P. Taylor's English History 1914-45.

But Lord Hattersley's style is closer to that of J.B. ('Honest Jack') Priestley: avuncular, populist and pink-spectacled. His accounts of social reforms, economic policy and labour struggles are too often class-prejudiced and over-detailed. He is more interesting on the consequences of the vindictive terms imposed on Germany after the Great War, mainly at the insistence of Georges Clemenceau of France. He is positively lively, and sometimes even original, on sport, literature, painting and entertainment. Most surprisingly, it turns out that Lord Hattersley has a blue-blooded hero. King George V is praised for the soundness of his views on, among other matters, Ireland, the constitutional rights of the Labour Party and his wayward son Edward VIII. 'Although never impartial, the King recognised the limitations of his power. And, from time to time, he gave his ministers thoroughly good advice'. (E.R.)

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