THE WAY WE WEREN'T: A TALE OF PORTLAND PLACE

Annalist rather than analyst, Professor Asa Briggs moves not dogmatically but deliberately through his own Music of Time series, the chronicles of broadcasting. His immense and detailed labours began in the 1950s, the first volume of this serial universe being published in 1961. The fourth, the most substantial to date, covers the period 1945–1955. Like the others it is a model of quite literal documentary history, strong on sources which range from the indispensable basic material—Cmd. 5091, 6852, 6974, 8116, 8416 and other official key papers—down to office memos and even snatches of conversation. The impression is of discreet panelled rooms and policy documents, in‐trays and loaf‐haired secretaries, all the apparatus of a living bureaucracy staffed by impeccable products of the British leadership machine creating a tradition as they go along, leaving behind them an immutable executive procedure as they move onwards, upwards or outwards from the great institution itself. Names now scarcely more than smoke trails in the memory swirl about the pages as once they swirled about the corridors, concocting reports, generating minutes, shaping paragraphs, giving material embodiment to the Corporation.