1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year

Written by Nick Rennison

Narrated by Toby Longworth

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.

1922 also saw the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi, the death of Marcel Proust, the election of a new pope, the release of the first major vampire movie, and the brief imprisonment in Munich of an obscure right-wing demagogue named Adolf Hitler.

In a sequence of vivid sketches, Nick Rennison conjures up all the drama and diversity of an extraordinary year.

"Its eclecticism worked brilliantly... tremendous, beguiling." WILLIAM BOYD

• Language: English
• Publisher: W. F. Howes Ltd
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781004076499

Nick Rennison

NICK RENNISON is a writer, editor and bookseller with a particular interest in the Victorian era and in crime fiction. He is the editor of six anthologies of short stories for No Exit Press: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Rivals of Dracula, Supernatural Sherlocks, More Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock's Sisters and American Sherlocks, plus 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. 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 BBC History Magazine.

Reviews for 1922

[Annis Rowan · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The book is excellent. The narrator is fantastic. The audio production is all over the place - halfway through one section it jumps to an entirely different one, so that you’re listening to something about art or science and the sentence abruptly breaks and you’re listening to the lynching of a black person or the execution of someone caught up in the Irish Civil War. This does a disservice to this good book about the crucial year of 1922. Several chunks of the book are missing as a result and it ends abruptly 15 minutes before the last chapter ends.