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In a Preface to the 1962 edition of Black Mischief  (first published 1932) author Evelyn Waugh puts his satire into historical context: "Black Mischief was written after a winter spent in East and Central Africa...Thirty years ago it seemed an anachronism that any part of Africa should be independent of European administration. History has not followed what then seemed its natural course."  The imagined island of Sakuyu, renamed the Empire of Azania by his His Imperial Majesty Seth, is situated off the eastern coast of Africa. Its native regime is incompetent, corrupt, with delusions of grandeur. Latching on to this 'failed state' are a number of non-Africans singularly ill-equipped to hold responsible positions in any government worth the name. Of the main expatriate character, Englishman Basil Seal, it was said by his mother Lady Celia, "it isn't even as though he was the kind of man who would do in Kenya". The official representative, "His Britan...

F rancis Scott  Key Fitzgerald  is most well known for his third novel The Great Gatsby  published in 1925. This book has been described as a "pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age" and "the definitive portrait of the Roaring Twenties". With such high praise it is important that readers understand the limits of the author's gaze. If The Great Gatsby  is definitive of anything, it is not the experience of the vast majority of Americans during this period. Fitzgerald is concerned only with a privileged minority. His first and second novels are clear examples of this bias. This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned  (1922) are all about the gilded offspring of the very rich. This Side of Paradise  begins with a breath-taking display of arrogance, the sort that  eye-wateringly large amounts of money can bring. As a boy, Amory Blaine is to be taken on his first Grand Tour of Europe by his mother.       "However, four hours ou...

  The idea that historical novels "contain allusions to the world in which and for which they were written" is easily applied to I, Claudius  (1934) and Claudius the God (1934). Robert Graves wrote his Claudian books at a time of building political unrest, when the threat of national dictatorships was no longer theoretical. World War One saw off a number of Europe's traditional autocrats ― Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, Austro-Hungary's Emperor Franz-Joseph, Russia's Tsar Nicholas ― with their realms dismembered and rearranged as separate states by the Treaty of Versailles. This did not bring the expected peace and security. In the wake of bankrupt monarchies, elected governments struggled. New authoritarian leaders rose up to replace them ― Il Duce! Der Fuhrer! Comrade Party Secretary ― modern political tyrannies aiming to redraw post-war boundaries.       "Like many other English intellectuals of this period, [author Robert Graves] was concerned by the wors...

America's much-vaunted principle of personal freedom has produced a combustible mix of the very best and the very worst that humankind is capable of. Dashiell Hammett, "the dean of hard-boiled detective fiction", was aware of this contradiction. In novels like Red Harvest (1929) and The Glass Key  (1931), he places his 'anti-heroes' in the very centre of self-interested politics. During the Interwar years, American cities were notorious for their dysfunction. Newspaper readers in the States and the rest of the industrialised world were familiar with the legislative failure of Prohibition. Gangster violence and police corruption seemed to be the natural condition of life in the land of the free. In Red Harvest  an unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency (San Francisco Branch) is sent to Pearsonville. The man who he is supposed to see is already dead. What follows is a process of civic cleansing by blood-bath. Pearsonville is a dirty town, owned in ev...

A young upper-class Englishman slumming it in the poorer suburbs of Berlin hardly seems a promising start to understanding the last years of the Weimar Republic. An unattributed quote in a Wikipedia article on Christopher Isherwood suggests otherwise: " Goodbye to Berlin  is his portrait of a city in which Adolf Hitler was rising to power ― enabled by poverty, unemployment, increasing attacks on Jews and Communists, and ignored by the defiant hedonism of night life in the cafes, bars and brothels". In March 1929, Isherwood aged 25 years, joined his schoolfriend Wystan (WH) Auden for a ten day visit. He returned there in July and finally moved there in November. Isherwood remained resident in Berlin until May 1933, when he was forced to flee the new Nazi regime with his German boyfriend Heinz Neddermeyer. His relevant stories are based on raw material recorded in his diary while he was there:       Mr Norris Changes Trains , a novel published in 1935,     ...

  That year, 1931, for the first and last time in my life, I deliberately set out to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. So recalled the English author Graham Greene. The book, which he self-consciously titled "An Entertainment", was published in 1932 as Stamboul Train (in the UK) and Orient Express  (in the US). The overnight-train theme was apparently popular in the Interwar Years. Greene admits that "before I completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express  (1932), the English had made Rome Express  (1932), and even the Russians had produced their railway film Turksib ". Agatha Christie's book Murder on the Orient Express  (UK) and Murder in the Calais Coach  (US) followed in 1934.   While both the books, Stamboul Train  and Murder on the Orient Express,  concern journeys on the express train service between Paris and Istanbul, they are very different in style. Greene's story is...

  During the interwar years from 1919 to 1939, Britain continued to rule over a vast global empire. Millions of non-Britons were seemingly compliant with the wishes of a relative handful of white administrators, traders and planters. That this preposterous bluff worked at all was a mystery that intrigued contemporary authors. Of writers like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, it is probably W Somerset Maugham who came closest to describing the colonial 'type', of intuiting the 'trick' of colonist confidence. His short fiction has become associated with the Federated Malay States (FMS) and British North Borneo (BNB) in particular. Through his stories collected in The Casuarina Tree  (1926) and Ah King  (1933), Maugham delivers an astute understanding of how a few Englishmen and their wives 'got away' with dominating many more Malays, Dayaks, Chinese and Tamils.  Maugham is reminded of the Casuarina trees he observed in the otherwise luxuriant jungle. They were ...