Author: Nick Rennison
1922 was a year of great turmoil. The events that took place then determined the rest of the twentieth century and in many cases continue to affect us even today, a hundred whole years later. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after six centuries. The British Empire began to shake, from Ireland to India. New states and new policies have emerged. The Soviet Union was founded, and Mussolini's Italy became the first fascist state. And Greece sank into mourning with the Asia Minor Catastrophe… Tutankhamun's tomb came to light, the use of insulin revolutionized medicine. And in Munich a young demagogue named Adolf Hitler went to prison for a while… Nick Rennison's book is reviving this landmark year, a year that changed the world. It gives us an idea of how people's lives were then - what they sang, what celebrities they admired, what they feared, what they dreamed of - and at the same time unfolds before us the events that shook their daily lives and laid the foundations for the cosmogony that would follow turbulent twentieth century. 1922 is not a faded period photograph. It is our life - just before it becomes ours. According to the famous saying of the British writer Leslie Poles Hartley, “the past is a foreign country. "Things are done differently there." A century later, the events of 1922 continue to have many and varied effects. Nick Rennison presents in an enlightening and fun way at the same time snapshots of a past that is unbelievable how many similarities it has with today.