The Long Week End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939

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The Long Week End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939

3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 · rating details · 80 ratings · 8 reviews

"The Long Week-End" is the authors' evocative phrase for the period in Great Britain's social history between the twin devastations of the Great War and World War II. From a postwar period of prosperity and frivolity through the ever-darkening decade of the thirties, The Long Week-End deftly and movingly preserves the details and captures the spirit of the time.

paper, 455 pages

Published April 1st 2001 by W.W. Norton & Company (first published 1940)

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May 02, 2011 Gary Land rated it 4 of 5 stars

I have had this book on my shelf for a long time but never got around to reading it because I did not teach British history. Now I have and found most of it quite interesting. The title refers to the period between the two world wars when the British apparently did everything they could to forget the trauma of WWI. This is not an academic history. Robert Graves was a famous novelist and poet while his coauthor, Alan Hodge, who may have written most of the book, was a young man just recently out...more

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Dec 08, 2012 Shonda Wilson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Let me preface my opinion of this text with if you read it you have to understand it within the context of the time when it was read... Graves and Hodge wrote the text at the beginning of WWII, so some of their views and statements seems a bit dated in comparison to our social norms today...there are some references to women and homosexuals that seem a bit out of place, but more in sync with the time period. Besides that, the text takes a pretty in depth look at society during the interwar perio...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Jill rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: wwi-wwii, world-history

One of the classic social/political histories of the inter-war period in Britain and the Empire. It begins with the "peace" in 1918 and ends as WWII began (for England) on September 3, 1939. The author, Robert Graves, whose autobiography Goodbye to All That also stands as a classic of the disillusionment that WWI brought to his generation. approaches this history seriously but still keeps tongue in cheek in some sections. He covers just about everything that was going on during those years.........more

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Apr 20, 2010 Roger Norman rated it 3 of 5 stars

Something of a potboiler from two well-known authors, described as 'breathless' on the cover of the Penguin edition, but still an absorbing study of the norms and fashions and attitudes of inter-war Britain. It will survive, I suspect, because there's nothing else quite like it and was written (in a hurry)in the immediate aftermath (1940) of the period it describes.

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Apr 16, 2011 Gabriele Wills rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: between-the-wars, history

Interesting as much for what it reveals abut the attitudes of the time and society in which the book was written as for what it covers.

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Jun 18, 2008 Diane rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of the best social histories I've ever read. Made such sense out of the incomprehensible time between the wars.

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Oct 23, 2007 Kate marked it as to-read

This was on Shirley Mullen's recommended reading list under the category of "history."

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Nov 13, 2008 Jennell McHugh rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: culture, history, reference, brit

Snoooooooooooooooze! Albeit a necessary snooze.

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May 16, 2013 Elizabeth Moffat marked it as to-read

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Shelves: 20th-century, history, non-fiction, british-literature, uk

May 13, 2013 Nigeyb is currently reading it

May 06, 2013 Mauro Mello rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Apr 27, 2013 Dori rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Apr 08, 2013 Steve Dewey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Apr 03, 2013 Robin is currently reading it · review of another edition

Mar 23, 2013 Geevee marked it as to-read

Shelves: british-history, between-the-world-wars, british-monarchy, first-world-war, london, second-world-war, film-tv-theatre-arts-press

Mar 20, 2013 Herb Hastings marked it as to-read

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Feb 25, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

May 07, 2013 Miranda is currently reading it · review of another edition

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Shelves: to-read-nonfiction

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About Robert Graves

Robert Ranke Graves, born in Wimbledon, received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G. H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, G...more Robert Ranke Graves, born in Wimbledon, received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G. H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did".
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart failure.(less)

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