Literary Review
Fascinating and inspired...[an] absorbing and highly original book.
BBC History Magazine
[It] resurrects an intriguing character from the history of archaeology...[and] recreates a vanished way of looking at history itself.
Current Archaeology
Kitty Hauser has produced a brilliant biography, dealing not only with the man but also the age.
The Sunday Telegraph
The fact that Kitty Hauser has managed to construct such a compelling read ... represents a triumph.
The Times
Hauser's biography casts a sideways shadow on the Britishness we are now trying to define.
Mail on Sunday
[A] powerful beautifully focused biography.
The Sunday Times
[A] cautionary tale of hubris and ideology, told with imagination and wry sympathy.
The Independent
[An] impressive piece of intellectual history; strangely moving, and impeccably written.
Product Description
O.G.S. Crawford (1886-1957) was a man who thought history held the answers to everything, and that to study it was to know humanity's glorious future. At first a field archaeologist, digging with his young fellow Edwardians into the mysterious mounds and ditches of rural England, he became a photographer/observer flying over the Western Front during the First World War - an experience that taught him the new skills of interpreting the earth from above and made him a pioneer of aerial archaeology. Then he fell in love with Marxism, was befriended by H.G. Wells, and travelled to the Soviet Union as one of its disciples.In the 1930s, it seemed to him that contemporary Britain would soon disappear, conquered by history's inevitable march to world socialism, and he made a photographic study of everyday things - churches and advertising hoardings - as future evidence of how unenlightened British society had once been in its worship of God and the motor car. Later there came angry disillusionment and a book, too bitter to be published, called "Bloody Old Britain". In recounting Crawford's extraordinary story, Kitty Hauser uses many of his photographs and penetrates neglected but fascinating aspects of British life and belief that have themselves become history.
