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Having it So Good
Having it So Good
Oct 5, 2024 1:40 PM

Author:Peter Hennessy

Having it So Good

Winner of the Orwell Prize

The second part of Peter Hennessy's celebrated Post-War Trilogy, Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties captures Britain in an extraordinary decade, emerging from the shadow of war into growing affluence.

'If the Gods gossip, this is how it would sound' Philip Ziegler, Spectator Books of the Year

The 1950s was the decade in which Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile, Bill Haley released 'Rock Around the Clock', rationing ended and Britain embarked on the traumatic, disastrous Suez War.

In this highly enjoyable, original book, Peter Hennessy takes his readers into front rooms, classrooms, cabinet rooms and the new high-street coffee bars of Britain to recapture, as no previous history has, the feel, the flavour and the politics of this extraordinary time of change.

'Utterly engaging ... a treat. It breathes exhilaration' Libby Purves, The Times

'A particular treat ... fine, wise and meticulously researched' Andrew Marr

'Stands clear of the field as our best narrative history of this decisive decade' Peter Clarke, Sunday Times

'A compelling narrative ... Hennessy's love of the flesh and blood of politics breathes on every page' Tim Gardam, Observer

'The late Ben Pimlott once described Hennessy as "something of a national institution". You can forget the first two of those five words' Guardian

Reviews

A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life… Homecoming is an extraordinary and compelling book in which the memories of bus drivers, civil servants, engineers, nurses, RAF and army recruits, teachers, shop stewards and seamstresses jostle with those of journalists, musicians, novelists and poets... The recovered memories in Homecoming are a formidable challenge to those still nostalgic for a lost empire, to all who cling to narrow and parochial definitions of Britishness... The voices in Homecoming sing throughout the book but they also reverberate pain, for so many are recounting stories they do not want to remember.

—— Hazel V Carby , Daily Telegraph

Grant is the writer to do justice to [the Windrush Generation’s] lives… he has conducted dozens of interviews, dug into the Mass Observation archives, and combed through semi-forgotten oral histories from the 1960s to produce this anthology of submerged lives that prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details.

—— Sukhdev Sandhu , Observer

Homecoming by Colin Grant is...by turns sad, painful, warm, revelatory and utterly fascinating. I think we would live in a slightly kinder and better country if everyone read [it].

—— Mark Haddon , New Statesman *Books of the Year*

Drawing on scores of first-hand accounts, Colin Grant offers oral history at its finest.

—— Bel Mooney , Daily Mail

Hundreds of first hand interviews, archive footage and memoir extracts of the Windrush Generation, beautifully edited into a patchwork quilt of experience and heritage. It's so powerful hearing these voices direct, making for a hopeful and angry, joyful and tear-jerking read.

—— Grazia

[Grant] lets people speak for themselves… there is much to enjoy. Some of the memories are painful, some are joyous, others are much more ambivalent.

—— Clive Davis , The Times

The Windrush generation’s voices are rarely heard, but Grant’s anthology is informative and funny, a well-researched window into a vanished world.

—— Sarah Hughes , i

[An] impressive work of oral history.

—— BBC History

Colin Grant has interviewed and collected nearly 200 voices from [the Windrush] era, from all walks of life, including policemen and fascists. It's quite a feat.

—— Bernardine Evaristo , i Newspaper

The structure of Homecoming gives its subjects space to speak for themselves, with each vignette providing a glimpse into little known history… Grant’s collection of voice…exposes effectively the cruel logic of Britain’s legacy of domination.

—— Renni Eddo-Lodge , Guardian

Interesting and nuanced.

—— Literary Review

[A] superb oral history… Interspersed with social commentary and pages of sprightly autobiography.

—— Ian Thomson , Tablet

In Homecoming… Colin Grant collates fragments from several hundred interviews, first-hand and archival, with a cross-section of Caribbean immigrants to Britain from the 1940s and early 60s, and allows his subjects to speak for themselves in idiosyncratic statements that refuse to be co-opted into a generalized account of immigrant experience… A fascinatingly varied tapestry emerges of why people came, what they made of it when they got here, and how they related both their Caribbeanness and their blackness.

—— Lloyd Bradley , Times Literary Supplement

Homecoming is an important book which records the voice of a generation as they fade into history... here we can listen to that generation telling its story in its own words.

—— Richard Hopton , Country & Town House

[Homecoming] artfully break the silence surrounding these unheralded lives [of the Windrush generation] and is essential reading for those who wish to know and honour them

—— Sara Collins, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON , Guardian

An extraordinarily detailed and diverse portrait of the Windrush generation through oral histories

—— Reader's Digest

Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers

—— Maira Kalman, American illustrator, artist and writer

To belong to a place is not to be able to choose what it takes from you. But we can choose what we take from it. Nora Krug takes from her German homeland, and then gives to us, a sense of what it is like to be German today, and a guide to how a reckoning with the past can begin

—— Timothy Snyder , author of On Tyranny and Black Earth

As the Jewish heir of grandparents who themselves had to flee the upsurge of fascism in their German homelands, I found granddaughter Nora Krug's heartrending investigation of her own family's painstakingly occluded history through those years especially moving. But as an American living through these, our very own years of a seemingly inexorable drift into one's still not quite sure what, I found Krug's achingly realized graphic memoir downright unsettling, for what will our own grandchildren one day make of us and our own everyday compromises and failures to attend?

—— Lawrence Weschler , author of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers

Nora Krug's book Heimat is a heart-wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn't stop reading it

—— Hava Beller, Director of 'The Restless Conscience'
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