MixedFinancial TImes...engaging and racy ... Yet Hamilton-Paterson wants to have it every way at once, mourning and damning postwar Britain in alternating passages. He spends the book lamenting a supposedly British inability to plan and then, in the final chapter, seems to suggest there is something a bit romantic and scrappy about it after all ... While the book is pacy, the tendency to get sidetracked and leave arguments hanging makes it unsatisfying. Sometimes he seems barely to have room for all his reasons why the country has gone to the dogs ... Hamilton-Paterson’s account of Britain’s industrial decline has a dash of amateurish brilliance. Unfortunately, it has been outclassed by more professional offerings.
