1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year

By Nick Rennison

1922 was a year of great turbulence and upheaval. Its events reverberated throughout the rest of the twentieth century and still affect us today, 100 years later.

Empires fell. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after more than six centuries. The British Empire had reached its greatest extent but its heyday was over. The Irish Free State was declared and demands for independence in India grew. New nations and new politics came into existence. The Soviet Union was officially created and Mussolini's Italy became the first Fascist state.

In the USA, Prohibition was at its height. The Hollywood film industry, although rocked by a series of scandals, continued to grow. A new mass medium - radio - was making its presence felt and, in Britain, the BBC was founded. In literature it was the year of peak modernism. Both T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses were first published in full.

In society, already changed by the trauma of war and pandemic, the morals of the past seemed increasingly outmoded; new ways of behaving were making their appearance. The Roaring Twenties had begun to roar and the Jazz Age had arrived.
In a sequence of vividly written sketches, Nick Rennison conjures up all the drama and diversity of an extraordinary year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oldcastle Books
• Release date: Nov 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780857304681

Nick Rennison

NICK RENNISON is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in modern history and in crime fiction. He is the author of 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year, A Short History of Polar Exploration, Peter Mark Roget: A Biography, Freud and Psychoanalysis, Robin Hood: Myth, History & Culture and Bohemian London, published by Oldcastle Books, and the editor of six anthologies of short stories for No Exit Press. He is also the author of The Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction, 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and Sherlock Holmes: An Unauthorised Biography. His crime novels, Carver's Quest and Carver's Truth, both set in nineteenth-century London, are published by Corvus. He is a regular reviewer for both The Sunday Times and Daily Mail.

Reviews for 1922

[carltonc_5 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This short book filled with “factoid” anecdotal events from 1922 with a culture heavy Western (UK, Ireland and the USA) bias might be dismissed as trivial, if it were not so educational and fun. This is not at all the type of detail heavy history book that I usually read, but it is wonderfully informative and interesting. Despite its brevity, there are a few entries that appear to add nothing to our understanding of living in 1922, such as the death of a pope and election of his successor, which is completely unremarkable, and the accidental killing of Vladmir Nabokov’s father in a failed assassination attempt. The article that takes the prize here though is the entry that starts “May. The cricket season begins in England.”The historical stories are enlivened by humour where appropriate, such as the following about radio and the formation of the BBC: “When (a famous opera singer) arrived at the Marconi works, it soon became clear that Dame Nellie (Melba) had little notion of how radio worked. She was taken on a tour by a proud employee who pointed out the 140-foot tall transmitters, from the top of which her voice would be broadcast to listeners around the world. ‘Young man,’ she boomed in reply, ‘if you think I’m going to climb up there, you are very much mistaken.’”A useful short bibliography is provided,with an acknowledgment to Robert Grave’s social history of Britain in the inter-war years, The Long Weekend, which perhaps provided an inspiration for the style of this book.Overall, being easy, fun and informative, this book gives an entertainingly kaleidoscopic impression of 1922, providing the reader with contemporary tabloid sensations and sporting highlights, but also detailing the truly historic political and cultural events of the time, whose importance might only be recognised with hindsight.I received a Netgalley copy of this book, but this review is my honest opinion.