Bonny Lunch with Keith Lowe
Tuesday 4th March at 12.30 | Pall Mall | £75.00
Our speaker at the next Bonny Lunch on Tuesday 4th March at 12:30 for 13:00 is Keith Lowe, who is a specialist in the impact of the Second World War. His theme is Savage Continent, Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Imagine a world without institutions, where borders between countries seem to have dissolved, endless landscape over which people travel in search of communities that no longer exist. There are no governments, no schools or universities, no libraries or archives, no cinema or theatre, no television. Radio occasionally works, but the signal is distant, and almost always in a foreign language. There are no banks, money no longer has any meaning. There are no shops, no one has anything to sell. Nothing is made here: the great factories and businesses that used to exist have all been destroyed or dismantled. There are no tools, save what can be dug out of the rubble. There is no food.
Law and order is virtually non-existent; there is no police force and no judiciary. In some areas there no longer seems to be any clear sense of what is right and what is wrong. People help themselves to whatever they want without regard to ownership. Men with weapons roam the streets, taking what they want and threatening anyone who gets in their way. Women of all classes and ages prostitute themselves for food and protection. There is no shame. There is no morality. There is only survival..
Keith Lowe is the author of several major works of history. His first book, Inferno, was a critically-acclaimed study of the bombing of Hamburg in 1943. His second book, Savage Continent, became a Sunday Times top ten bestseller, and went on to win both the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and Italy’s national Cherasco History Prize. It is now a standard work on the wave of violence and revenge that swept Europe after the war. The Fear and the Freedom is an intimate history of the long-term consequences of the Second World War, and the shadow that it still casts over our lives today. It was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Non-fiction Crown.
Keith regularly speaks on TV and radio, and he often lectures on postwar history at venues across Europe and North America. He has written for a variety of newspapers and journals, including the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the Wall Street Journal, El Paìs and the NeueZürcherZeitung. He serves on the historical advisory board for Liberation Route Europe, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.