The Alienation Effect
  • Published: 24 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241378205
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $89.99
Categories:

The Alienation Effect

How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

Formats & editions
Hardback
24 Jun 2025
EBook
27 Mar 2025
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Britain. Made in Europe.

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.

Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.

Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.
  • Published: 24 June 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241378205
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $89.99
Categories:

Praise for The Alienation Effect

The book I’ve been waiting for. A masterpiece

James Fox

A brilliant work of history. Owen Hatherley makes a fierce and elegant case for British culture as a living tapestry made ever brighter by newcomers to our strange island

Lynsey Hanley

Meticulously researched... Hatherley is an exhilarating guide

Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times

Impassioned and erudite, Hatherley writes with panache and never becomes flat-footedly ideological... In drawing attention to a hugely important yet neglected phenomenon that has shaped our culture for better and worse, this is a genuinely important study that deserves to win prizes

Rupert Christiansen, Telegraph

Hatherley, whose background is in writing about architecture, moves with confidence through the fields of film, typography and art. The book is thick with information, sometimes resembling the gazetteers or guides he has previously written... It’s often acute, informative, passionate and witty, a sometimes moving tribute to achievements in the face of adversity, and an essential antidote to crude theories of national identity

Rowan Moore, Observer

A combination of jewel-like detail and panoramic sweep… Arresting… This monumental work secures for Hatherley his place in the tradition of English writers who have moralized about architecture, a lineage stretching from John Ruskin to Ian Nairn and, yes, Pevsner… A passionate, erudite book

Michael Ledger-Lomas, Jacobin

Encyclopaedic... Fascinating

David Honigmann, Spectator

Hatherley offers a set of vivid and consistently stimulating portraits of individual artists and thinkers… This is an admirable book, ambitious in its scope and very readable… Hatherley proves himself a fair-minded historian, capable of intellectual generosity even towards people and traditions he deplores… This book will stimulate readers

Nikhil Krishnan, New Statesman