Volume 8, Number 5 · March 23, 1967
Inside the Aquarium
By Goronwy Rees
Diaries and Letters 1930-1939
by Harold Nicolson, edited by Nigel Nicolson
Atheneum, 448 pp., $7.50
Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War
by Peter Stansky, by William Abrahams
Little, Brown, 430 pp., $7.50
We still do not quite understand what happened in England in the Thirties. It is a period for which we by now possess an ample documentation in the form of memoirs, reminiscences, autobiographies, and biographies; and in addition we have our own memories. Yet in spite of all this, there is the slightly frustrating feeling that something has been left out, and that we still lack the essential clue to understanding. We may, of course, be deceiving ourselves. It may be that the characteristic feature of life in England in the Thirties was precisely that nothing did happen, except a decline in vitality, a fundamental failure of nerve. Yet if we accept this, it becomes almost impossible to understand how Britain, which in 1939 was drinking the last bitter dregs of the cup of appeasement, by 1940 should have been able to win, in the skies over London, one of the decisive battles of the world.
Review, 2623 words
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