Second Georgian Age. By David Vaiani

The perennial concern with new books on the interwar era is that there is nothing original left to say.

But with Alwyn Turner’s work, any trace of weariness disappears. Although the great events of the period certainly feature, Turner prefers looking beyond Westminster, to ‘take the temperature of the nation, so that Agatha Christie looms larger than Virginia Woolf’.

Shellshocked is crammed with rich detail on topics, including popular entertainment (the funeral of Marie Lloyd – ‘Queen of the Music Hall’ – attracted an astonishing 50,000 people); the rise of cinema (London had 268,000 cinema seats by 1929, one for every 20 residents), and the growth of radio (35,000 licences in 1922; a staggering nine million by 1939).

Turner also likes to intertwine culture and politics. So a famous novel and remarks from the King are joined to summarise the ambivalence many felt after the General Strike.

Goodbye, Mr Chips (1934) but despair was misplaced, because ‘not a life was lost, not a shot fired’.

Officially, the King echoed that sentiment, but in private he was quick to mock ‘the revolution’, telling the Dean of Windsor, ‘I could have done it better myself.’

Interwar pacifism is expertly chronicled, before Turner shows how novels and films signalled a change of mood after 1936. In Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, Charters says, ‘Pacifist, eh? Won’t work, old boy. Early Christians tried it and got thrown to the lions.’

The Abdication is dispatched in the same brisk manner in which Baldwin handled the crisis. Turner then reveals the most interesting fact about Edward VIII, namely that his only real achievement was to rescind a ban on theatrical portrayals of Queen Victoria.

Elsewhere, however, censorship laws remained stubbornly in place. ‘We do allow “damn”,’ sniffed the BBFC, ‘but we don’t allow “bloody”.’

Other banned words included Antichrist, bastard, bawdy, belly, blasted, bum, gigolo, harlot, lewd, lousy, masochist, nappies, nuts, nymphomania, old cock, privy and strumpet.

The pen portraits are sharp and incisive throughout. Baldwin was ‘no one’s idea of an assassin’. Turner quotes Attlee comparing Mosley to ‘a feudal landlord abusing tenants who were in arrears with their rent’.

The BBC’s John Reith, ‘a model of late-Victorian rectitude’, asked job applicants whether they ‘accepted the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ’. Tough to imagine that line of enquiry at today’s BBC.

Neville Chamberlain’s frosty arrogance is well captured. He was ‘cold and unsympathetic, more like the chairman of a municipal committee anxious to keep the rates down’.

Compared with other countries, Britain chartered a relatively moderate course through the storms of the interwar years. The General Strike was one example. Turner also points out that, as painful as the Irish War of Independence was, it cost 2,000 lives, whereas the Spanish Civil War cost 400,000.

Nor does he diminish the suffering experienced by many during the ‘Hungry ’30s’. But he maintains that ‘the objective facts of the Depression were not as bad in Britain as elsewhere’, and certainly not ‘on the scale of America’s Dust Bowl’.

Although the Jarrow marchers might have choked on their tea at hearing such a view, the truth, as Turner explains, is that ‘the pain was localised, and outside the distressed areas there was a more positive mood’, thanks mainly to thriving new industries.

On appeasement, Turner does not single out Chamberlain for blame. Instead, ‘Munich was an acknowledgement of Britain’s impotence’. The 1936 Rhineland crisis was the moment to strike against Hitler, but there was little public enthusiasm for such a bold move.

Only in 1937 was there ‘any sense of urgency’, and yet ‘Britain was not in a state of readiness for war’. This is undoubtedly true, but it was also partly Chamberlain’s fault, as initially during his time as Chancellor he had cut spending on the forces.

Shellshocked, Turner reminds us that, even in the darkest moments, ordinary life carried on. After the Munich Agreement in 1938, around five million Britons played darts.

The press noted a ‘slimming craze’. Some 35,000 fans watched Spurs host Arsenal in August, and later that month 4,000 campers holidayed at Billy Butlin’s Skegness camp. As Auden put it, ‘the dogs go on with their doggy life’.

With German tanks rumbling past the Arc de Triomphe in 1940, the filmmaker George Pearson was in a pub in England, as a group of labourers were discussing the fall of France.

‘Well, now we know where we are,’ said one to the barman. ‘Give me another pint, Joe.’

As this gleaming gem of a book demonstrates, the interwar years were gruelling for Britain, but they could have been much worse. There was always time to enjoy another drink.

David Vaiani wrote Jeremy Catto: A Portrait of the Quintessential Oxford Don