SOURCE: “An Unsentimental Journey,” in Washington Post Book World, September 23, 1984, pp. 11, 13.

In the following excerpted review, Thubron contrasts Bainbridge's English Journey with J. B. Priestley's 1933 book of the same title.

In the autumn of 1933 the British novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley undertook a celebrated expedition through his own country, which resulted in his English Journey. At a time when most literary travelers were wandering the Mediterranean or were still describing an England of hedgerow land and cathedral close, Priestley confronted the country head-on. With no more than a glance at Salisbury and the Cotswolds, he plunged into the Midlands and the North: Birmingham, the Black Country, his childhood home of Bradford, the Potteries, Liverpool, Tyneside. Here was the demoralized heart of an England still locked in the Depression. At worst its sordidness and decline were unrelieved—a wilderness of derelict factories and rotting suburbia. At best it...