Comfort reading for the interwar years
A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows, Nicola Wilson’s galère – Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden, Sylvia Lynd and J.B. Priestley – turn out to have made up the selection panel of the early 1930s Book Society. The subtitle is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Even at its high-water mark, the Society’s membership was in the low five figures.
