Jonathan Hogg, British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long 20th Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 231pp.

This is a treasure trove of nuclear-themed nuggets of information, ranging from now tragicomic newspaper advertisements of the 1930s hyping radium as a desirable property of hair dyes and health lamps to an impressively thorough listing of books, plays, films, and even video games with still disturbing scenarios of devastating attack by nuclear and thermonuclear bombs. The volume will undoubtedly be useful as a compendium of information on how various British media responded to the nuclear revolution. Beyond that, its intellectual claims and contribution are less clear. In part this is because of presentational problems. The writing, particularly in the more conceptual sections, is not always lucid, as illustrated by the cloudily repetitive sentence: “The cultural logic at play meant that it became normal for anti-nuclear sentiment to be part of the cultural backdrop of British culture, suffusing many cultural forms” (pp. 156–157; emphasis added). In addition, the default...