[In the following review, Scott-Thomas finds Just the Other Day to be lacking in the appropriate gravity and perspective.]

Mr. John Collier and Mr. Iain Lang, the authors of Just the Other Day—an “Informal History of Great Britain Since the War,” as the sub-title runs—acknowledge their indebtedness for their main idea to Mr. F. L. Allen, who treated the post-War years in America in his book Only Yesterday. But an earlier and better example of this kind of writing is to be found in Mr. R. H. Gretton's Modern History of the English People, which ends at the year 1922. Mr. Gretton reviewed all aspects of the national life, serious and light, with equal breadth, versatility and vivacity, but with more essential gravity.

Gravity the present book undoubtedly lacks, and that implies the absence of a sense of proportion distinguishing what is fundamental from what is superficial. The authors find it difficult to refrain from a quizzical attitude to anything and everything that they touch, so that the scale of values is reduced to a least common denominator which is wholly negative. This suspicion of pertness in the treatment of all national questions, from the fall of a Government to a raid on a night club, weakens the reader's confidence in the authors' statement of facts and opinions. This is a pity, for they have been very careful in ascertaining the truth about public events which have often been misrepresented, and the narrative is on the whole reliable; and their passing judgments on social, literary, and artistic movements are free from many of the follies of contemporary prejudice. Their book deserved something better than the trivial jacket in which it is displayed.

In such a survey the mistakes of the past loom large before us. The book starts in that post-Armistice year when the talk was of “hanging the Kaiser,” “making Germany pay” and “reconstruction”; when the “task” was defined as that of making “Britain a fit country for heroes to live in” (the authors avoid the mistake so often made in quoting those words). In regard to German reparations, we are confronted with an astonishing extract from so sober a journal as the Economist.

As for collecting the bill without damaging our industries, this should not be a very difficult matter. … In normal times, when it is allowed to do business on business methods, Lombard Street has little difficulty in transferring any amount of money between nations that are in economic communication.

From “flag-waving” and peace-making the authors turn to post-War housing, industrial unrest, strikes; and from these subjects to Mr. Vale Owen, night clubs and Dora, Mr. Wells's Outline of History and so to the Irish Civil War, the Black and Tans and the Irish Treaty. In dealing with the Irish war the authors reveal less than their usual fairness in apportioning praise and blame, and present a wholly inadequate account of the final settlement. They conclude this section with the remark: “The Irish showed a lack of historical tact … in not staging their revolution half a century earlier.”

In quick succession they review the events of the years of “Tranquillity,” the General Strike, the second Labour Government and the National Government, and the topics that from time to time have been the talk of the moment—Mlle. Lenglen, Mr. Baldwin's pipe, greyhound racing, the boom of the “sports girls,” cricket matches, neo-Georgian poetry and the “Bloomsbury circle.” All of these have belonged to the social life of the last fourteen years, and enter into the authors' conception of history, which, they say—adapting the words of Emerson—is “the lengthened shadow of Mr. Everyman.”