While the battles for modern art & society were being fought in France & Spain it has seemed a betrayal that John Betjeman & John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches & tea-shops In this multi-award winning book now available in paperback Alexandra Harris tells a different story In the 1930s & 1940s artists & writers explored what it meant to be alive in England Eclectically passionately wittily they showed that the modern need not be at war with the past Constructivists & conservatives could work together & even the Bauhaus emigre Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was beguiled into taking photographs for Betjemans nostalgic Oxford University Chest This modern English renaissance was shared by writers painters gardeners architects critics tourists & composers John Piper Virginia Woolf Florence White Christopher Tunnard Evelyn Waugh E M Forster & the Sitwells are part of the story along with Bill Brandt Graham Sutherland Eric Ravilious & Cecil Beaton