A very friendly review in Metro (which is a very popular paper indeed) today. Here it is in full: “The Britain whose subjects went to church, asked God to save our gracious Queen and filled 1980s football grounds to hear US preacher Billy Graham evangelise has gone. What followed is the premise for this consistently entertaining book, in which Moreton mixes his own rather amusing faith journey with an excellent, chatty social history of 1980s and 1990s Britain.
The sections on the Church Of England’s battles with Margaret Thatcher alone are worth the less successful diversions into polemic: he’s prone to suddenly suggesting the police ‘don’t like anyone who is different from them’.
A book which tries to take our 21st-century religious pulse but which also explores why we’ve lost respect for authority could descend into a paean for a lost age but Moreton steers clear of conservative nostalgia. He finds himself on unsure ground when trying to discuss the nebulous ‘new soul’ of Britain but how scary would it be if one person really knew who we all were and what we believed?”