The sudden, baffling economic depression of the 1930s brought worldwide unemployment, poverty, and despair—the 20thcentury equivalent of the Black Death. Those in brief authority remained perplexed. Nobody could get the unemployed back to work or deliver what the farmers were producing to the people who were starving. Democratic capitalism no longer seemed to function. The solution, when it came, turned out to be World War II.

Brendon, Keeper of the Churchill Archives and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, gives the 1930s a wonderful summing up in this chronicle of how the Great Depression affected the great powers (the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union). He could have called his book an unauthorized biography of the decade, for, along with reviewing the specialized and revisionist studies, he has mined all the gossip from diaries and memoirs. In a style that combines the authoritative speculations of A. J. P. Taylor with the amusing ironies of Malcolm Muggeridge, Brendon tells us what people wore, what they ate, what they read.

He is particularly interested in the manipulation of public opinion, which the new media of radio and motion pictures took to unprecedented levels. "Propaganda became part of the air people breathed during the 1930s," he writes. Public spectacles and entertainments around the globe were crafted with a propagandist intent: "King George V’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and his son’s coronation were a democratic riposte to Hitler’s barbaric pageants at Nuremberg. Stalin’s purge trials dramatised a new kind of tyranny. Mussolini’s aerial circuses advertised the virility of Fascism.... Hollywood created celluloid myths to banish the Depression and affirm the New Deal."