[In the following review, the critic finds Just the Other Day to be well written and conceived but overly didactic in its social commentary.]

There is a peculiarly revolting passage in the adventures of Gulliver in Brobdingnag where Swift describes the impression conveyed to his hero by a sojourn in the private apartments of some ladies of the court. Magnified out of all friendly perspective these ladies, engaged on their toilets, are revealed as loathsome, hideous monsters. Allowing for twentieth century restraint, Gulliver's point of view on this occasion is that adopted by Messrs. John Collier and Iain Lang in their “informal history of Britain since the war.” To them history, informal, is on the whole the lengthened shadow of a moron. As a compilation their book is admirably complete. Each flying folly of the past twelve years is gravely, dispassionately presented; each nine-days'-wonder made to gleam anew in a colder, steadier light. We have chapters on the Bright Young People, Brighter London, Sport and Spectacle, Murder and Morals in the Making, besides the less amusing but not less important topics of Labour's Rise and Fall, the Economic Aspect and the Crisis. All are treated in the same strain of ironical pseudo-detachment—enough facts to relieve the text from an appearance of persiflage, enough gentle comment to provide almost consistently lively reading as one is led through labyrinths of thought and feeling which seem only half familiar. The perspective adopted is largely a reflection of the amount of space devoted to the events as they occurred by the daily and Sunday press, and the result is, as may be expected, an unflattering comment on the world we live in.

Sometimes the implied generalisations are a little glib, the retouching of the faded scenery a little crude. Commenting on the country's reception of the German Navy's last gesture at Seapa Flow, for instance, the authors will not allow us even a sense of humour:

Von Reuter was sent to Park Hall internment camp at Oswestry, where, a week after the scuttling of the Fleet, he was attacked by a crowd and struck in the face with a rotten egg. With this expression of indignation and frustrated triumph the nation had to rest content.

Even in such an orgy of victory the egg, one feels, is an over-simplified symbol of the nation's mixed emotions on the occasion. Mr. and Mrs. Everyman, whose views are frequently quoted, are at times endowed with a reflective, introspective intelligence which one feels regretfully to be far beyond their limited capacities. “Man felt,” say Messrs. Collier and Lang, “that he had lost his place in the historic procession, and he was eagerly grateful to any guide who offered to help him find it.” To which one is tempted to retort that fully eighty per cent of the population have never had any conception of a historical procession, and is therefore unlikely to worry unduly about its place therein until the uneasiness of the intelligentsia filters down through the brains of popular novelists and journalists, and is reinforced by harsh personal application. A similar criticism might be made of the very amusing chapter on changes in morality. For all the publicity which has been given them, these phenomena have still to penetrate the tough shells of tradition in which most of His Majesty's subjects contrive to live more or less contented lives.

In truth, this volume, for all its apparent, if limited, validity as a social document, tends to prove too much. It is not so much an impression of what has passed through the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Everyman since the war as a record of what a handful of weary sub-editors, night by night, thought would interest them. Politicians have every reason to know that newspapers are painfully untrustworthy indices of popular opinion, even when prejudices are dressed up to look like news at the instance of swollen-headed proprietors. And what is true of politics is even truer of more general interests. The newspaper-for-the-many is a mental relaxation, not a stimulus, to be skimmed by half-awake husbands on their way to work and dozed over by tired wives before going to bed. The sub-editor's eccentric hours of work render him peculiarly subject to “occupational parochialism.” He is never in a position to tell what ordinary people are thinking, and one feels that his unhappy guesses are the main source of Messrs. Collier and Lang's material. Nevertheless, as stimulating commentary on the cheaper side of the human shop-window, Just the Other Day was well worth writing and has been written very well.