"The long week-end" is Robert Grave's and Alan Hodge's evocative phrase for the period in Great Britain's social history between the twin devastations of the Great War and World War II. With brilliant wit and trenchant judgments they offer a scintillating survey of seemingly everything that went on of any consequence (or inconsequence) in those years in politics, business, science, religion, art, literature, fashion, education, popular amusements, domestic life, sexual relations -- much else.

Across this crowded canvas of British life stride the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Wallis Simpson, Neville Chamberlain, Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Woolf, Lord Beaverbrook, Evelyn Waugh, Winston Churchill, Marie Stopes, Aldous Huxley, Lloyd George, and dozens of other figures great and small who put their stamp on the era. From a postwar period of prosperity and frivolity defined by the high jinks of the Bright Young Things through the ever-darkening decade of the thirties punctuated by spiraling economic and political crises and shadowed by the inevitable conflagration to come The Long Week-End deftly and movingly preserves the details and captures the spirit of the time. It is social history the way it is meant to be written -- a classic of its kind.

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Table of contents:

Armistice, 1918
Revolution averted, 1919
Women
Reading matter
Post-war politics
Various conquests
Sex
Amusements
Screen & stage
Revolution again averted, 1926
Domestic life
Art, literature & religion
Education & ethics
Sport & controversy
The depression, 1930
Pacifism, nudism, hiking
The days of the Loch Ness monster
Recovery, 1935
The days of non-intervention
'The deepening twilight of barbarism'
Three kings in one year
Keeping fit & doing the Lambeth walk
Social consciences
'Markets close firmer'
Still at peace
Rain stops play, 1939