John Lyons's fascinating study opens with two starkly contrasting anecdotes. The first involves an encounter by the upper-class George Orwell with a drunken wartime GI in London: “Perfijious Albion. Never trust a Britisher.” Orwell is not impressed. The second features a working-class British girl, Margaret Tapster, who had strong affections for the GI sergeant who “would tenderly kiss her while he told her about his home and his mother and father” (1). Such divergent views Lyons tries to reconcile in an overall appreciation of British perceptions of the United States, arguing that postwar impressions bifurcated along class lines. Lyons contends that the working and lower-middle classes fondly appreciated most things American, while the higher middle and upper classes resented the United States' assuming Britain's place as world leader and expressed contempt for its lack of culture, its materialism, and its supposedly negative impact on moral standards. Cutting across some of these divisions were hard-left political dislike of US capitalism and right-wing imperial dislike of American power and anticolonial rhetoric, though many voices on the right later morphed into a supportive attitude towards the United States during the Thatcher period as Britain turned to a more free-market economy, emulating America.

Such broad generalizations are courageous and convey a good deal of truth, but something as complex as gauging the attitudes of one national population towards another will never be completely caught in this way. Nonetheless, Lyons provides the detail to support the basic contours of the argument in a narrative packed with amusing and useful anecdotes, opinion-poll findings, and historical overviews that take in some of the key developments in Anglo-American postwar relations within the wider world context. For all this he is much to be appreciated and commended.

In chapter 2, Lyons expands on the early postwar cleft in British attitudes between the Conservatives, the upper class, and the Left on the one hand and the rest of the population on the other. “In the end,” he writes, “those who overtly criticized American popular culture and Americans were a distinct minority consisting mostly of the Conservative right and middle-class intellectuals. Many of the Labour left disliked free-market capitalism found in the United States and right-wing politics in the country but not Americans” (47). So the vast majority of Britons welcomed American popular music, fashion, consumer goods, food, comics, novels, television shows and films, architecture, expanding world leadership, and, though less consciously and thoroughly so, industrial practices. David Jones, we are told, was so enamored by the film The Alamo that he changed his name to Bowie (the hero with the knife); and similarly Maurice Micklewhite became Michael Caine after watching Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny. And, as Caine recounted, British war films—a hugely popular genre in the 1950s and 1960s—were about officers: American war films such as The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity were about enlisted men (58). America seemed to speak and appeal to “ordinary” British people far more than their own homegrown arts and culture.

That story is persuasive, but it is possible to identify a slightly different and somewhat overlooked perspective. One could argue that well before the 1950s and 1960s there was already a melding of British and American culture, often to a point where easy national distinctions broke down. Lyons mentions how much the novels of Raymond Chandler appealed to a British audience because the character spoke in idioms with which it could engage. But Chandler himself, along with icons such as T. S. Eliot and Henry James, could most conveniently be placed in the realm of Anglo-American: Eliot and James took British nationality, and Raymond Chandler spent 49 of his 70 years of life as a British citizen. The idea of a literary transatlantic community certainly has resonance. And that realization, which applies to other cultural realms as well, rather complicates assertions of a unidirectional flow of influence from the United States to the United Kingdom in the postwar period. This is not to overlook the extensive coverage that Lyons provides of British distinctiveness and the resilience of many things British, which interacted with American influences and transformed them on occasion, sometimes feeding them back to the United States—the 1960s outflow of music and fashion being a prime example. However, the idea of the emergence of something that could be termed “Anglo-American” might bring something more to this analysis.

Lyons does a good job showing how the flows of British and American politics sometimes diverged (postwar socialism and liberal capitalism) and sometimes coalesced (Thatcherism/Reaganism or Blairism/Clintonism) and how these shifts impacted British perceptions of the United States. Understandably, the historical overview that has to underpin Lyons's account of these shifts includes some errors and debatable points. For instance, the United States was of course at the heart of North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but it was the British who took the lead in pressing for and developing the ground for the alliance (8). At the end of the war the United States did not write off all wartime debts, largely because the Lend-Lease policy meant that there were none (9). Lyons's general impression of Britain's postwar malaise needs some counterbalancing: Britain still had the third largest economy in the world until the end of the 1950s, as well as a major worldwide defense presence. Ronald Reagan was definitely a hawk, at least between 1981 and 1984, but he had a visceral hatred of nuclear weapons, and it is not therefore appropriate to use the term “nuclear brinkmanship” regarding him: it applied more appropriately to John Foster Dulles and Dwight Eisenhower.

Finally, while this book is recommended as a hugely enjoyable read and one that contributes to a better understanding of Anglo-American relations, particularly on the cultural and social interaction levels (only other comparable works that come to mind are those of Robert Hendershot and Alison Holmes and Simon Rofe on diplomatic practice), it leaves a number of questions unresolved. Lyons often presents contrasting narratives side by side. So, for example, in chapter 3 there is much about American influences readily absorbed by the British working classes, which is then followed by a discussion of the serious reservations held by many of them concerning matters such as race relations. Such contrasting material is presented time and again. In one sense such juxtaposition works in that it qualifies the impression of uncritical admiration of the United States and resists oversimplification generally, but at the same time there is a feeling that the analysis is incomplete or inconclusive. Clearly the book leaves space for further discussion.

This kind of study is notoriously difficult to pull off successfully, and Lyons has done so to a remarkable extent. This is a good read, which repays generously.