Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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What British people really thought
WILL PODMORE listens keenly to the people’s voice expressing support for the USSR and disdain for the political Establishment and the empire
Popular support for the USSR was emphasised by the Arctic convoys, bringing food and munitions to Murmansk from 1941 - 1945. The image shows members of the crew clearing the frozen focsle of HMS INGLEFIELD during convoy duty in Arctic waters; the inset image shows Scottish artist Frederick Donald Blake’s propaganda image for the convoys
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Our People’s War: Home Intelligence Reports and the Monitoring of British Morale, June 1941 – December 1944
Jeremy Crang, Bloomsbury, £20
DURING the second world war, the British government conducted a unique experiment in monitoring public opinion, carried out by Home Intelligence, a unit of the Ministry of Information.
The government needed to know what people were thinking in order to know how best to make them think the right way.
Regional intelligence officers created panels of regional “contacts” to gather the raw material from which they compiled their weekly reports on public opinion. These contacts were recruited, on a ratio of one to every 10,000, from among men and women who were “sensible” and “level-headed.”
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