MARIA DUARTE recommends a remarkable study of the friendship between a Palestinian and a Pakistani, broken by a hostile state
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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
[National archives/Admiralty Official Collection/CC]
MATTHEW HAWKINS rakes through un-fancy words and flair-free summaries to find who and what might be flamboyant
PETER MASON is exhilarated by an exciting, well-considered and historically minded tribute to the great Trinidadian instrument
Reducing historical lives to ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles, we lose the nuance of those lives and a clearer understanding of past societies, suggests CLAIRE ISABELLA GILMOUR
CHRIS SEARLE relishes the genius of pianist Alexander Hawkins, his many ensembles, and his new album
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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