Auden called the 1930s a dishonest decade, though he himself was a quintessential child of the period. The Great Depression, war in Spain, Mussolini invading Ethiopia, Hitler in the ascendant in Germany, famine in the Ukraine, the American Dust Bowl - it easily sounds like a catalogue of disaster, yet there is much more to the decade than that. It was also a brilliant age of cinema, art and music, of innovation and forward thinking in many areas. Yet Armageddon looms hugely over all, since unemployment and other social evils nurtured war, and though war was slow in coming, come it did.
The European and world statesmen, Roosevelt and possibly Churchill excepted, were mediocre men and no match for Hitler and Stalin. Much of the book's material is almost over-familiar, yet it is well assembled and cogently presented.