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Most reviewed: We Danced All Night

07.07.08 Anna Richardson

Martin Pugh’s latest, We Danced All Night (Bodley Head), was last weekend’s most reviewed, while Irvine Welsh’s new novel, Crime (Cape), also notched up impressive coverage, with the author featuring in many newspapers, including on the front page of the Independent’s Review supplement.

Pugh’s social history of Britain between the wars received mainly positive reviews. In the Sunday Telegraph, John Campbell praised the book as a “comprehensive, vivid and highly readable survey”, highglighting “an excellent chapter on the decline of agriculture and the persistence of rural poverty”.

Campbell also commended the “eye-popping material on attitudes to sex and marriage, race and class” and concluded that “this is just one surprising detail from the richly textured tapestry of this absorbing book”.

Frances Wilson wrote in the Daily Telegraph that the book was a “rewarding study” and that it succeeded “in bringing out both the strangeness and the familiarity of this odd period of history”. She maintained that “challenging established narratives is what Martin Pugh does best”, and the Daily Express’s Duncan Fallowell agreed: “as Pugh moves from one topic to the next, one has the sense of dirty windows being cleaned, revealing remarkably new views.”

On the other side of the critical spectrum, Piers Brendon in the Guardian deemed We Danced All Night “disappointingly prosaic - and when he does try to say something arresting, he is apt to signal it with an exclamation mark”.

Brendon also wrote that Pugh was “stodgy about spiritualism” and “draws on little original research and relies on a suprisingly narrow range of published sources... And he occasionally errs”.

“Some people danced all night,” concluded Brendon. “Many more had nightmares.”

MOST REVIEWED (4th to 6th July)

We Danced All Night by Martin Pugh
(Bodley Head 978-0224076982 £20)
“Comprehensive, often astonishing” Daily Express
“Rewarding” Daily Telegraph
“Comprehensive, vivid and highly readable” Sunday Telegraph
“Disappointingly Prosaic” Guardian

Crime by Irvine Welsh
(Cape 9780224080538 £12.99)
“A bracing and engaging read” Sunday Telegraph
“Welsh narrowly avoids digging his own grave” Mirror
“The writing strives for extremes, but relentlessly fails to achieve more than the banal” Sunday Times

The Return by Victoria Hislop
(Headline Review 9780755332939 £17.99)
“Brilliant” Mirror
“An excellent beach read” Sunday Telegraph

Sashenka by Simon Montefiore
(Bantam Press 9780593056370 £12.99)
“Gripping . . . Apart from the sheer scale of the story, on which Montefiore never loses his grip, he is very good at some critical set pieces” Daily Express
“It’s huge characters and epic ambition carries echoes of Tolstoy himself” Daily Mail

Media Anna Richardson Bodley Head Most Reviewed Martin Pugh

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