Austerity Britain

"This is a great book. It doesn’t actually have much to say about the Olympics and gives you a sense, in a way, that the 1948 Olympics wasn’t such a huge deal. It was an important symbolic event, but it didn’t have that all-consuming quality that it has now. What this book does give you is a sense of what an incredibly dangerous and traumatic political time it was between 1945 and 1951 – the recovery from World War II, the birth of the Cold War and the break-up of empire. But at the same time it also gives you a sense of how little of that actually touched ordinary lives. Geopolitics flits in and out of people’s consciousness but it doesn’t consume it in the way you might think from reading about the lives of politicians. People don’t obsess about these things even when they’re living through what were extraordinarily dangerous times. Life goes on and the 1948 Olympics were very much in keeping with that way of thinking."