The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age
Armistice Day 1918 dawns with great joy for victorious Britain, but the nation must confront the carnage war has left in its wake. In The Great Silence, Juliet Nicolson looks through the prism of daily life to narrate the rich but unknown history of the slow healing Britain undergoes in the two...
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Armistice Day 1918 dawns with great joy for victorious Britain, but the nation must confront the carnage war has left in its wake. In The Great Silence, Juliet Nicolson looks through the prism of daily life to narrate the rich but unknown history of the slow healing Britain undergoes in the two years following that day.The two-year anniversary of the Armistice brings some closure at last: the remains of a nameless soldier, dug up from a French battlefield and escorted to London in a homecoming befitting a king, are laid to rest in glory in the Tomb of the Unknown at Westminster Abbey. “The Great Silence,” the two minutes observed in memory of those lost, halts an entire nation in silent reverence as Big Ben strikes eleven.The Great Silence paints a vivid picture of a nation fighting the forces that threaten to tear it apart—and discovering the common bonds that, as it moves into a new era, hold it together.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780802145406 (080214540X)
ASIN: 080214540X
Publish date: June 14th 2011
Publisher: Grove Press
Pages no: 302
Edition language: English
My Great War reading list got off to a decent start with this book. Nicolson is the grand-daughter of Harold Nicolson, a British representative at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations. She has written about the Edwardian period before, so she is well versed in this era of British history. She takes...
I had high hopes for this book, and was looking forward to finding out more about the two years immediately after the end of World War 1 which presaged a period of enormous social change. The book takes a chronological approach, and gives almost every chapter a one word title (e.g. Wound, Hopelessne...
In The Great Silence Juliet Nicolson has a way of accumulating details that made me feel as if I was living in post-WWI Britain. Using sources that included archives, letters, diaries, newspaper articles and even interviews Nicholson tells moving personal anecdotes about both well known and lesser k...
7 years ago
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