Tory Heaven (1948) was Marghanita Laski's third book, another satire after both Love on the Super Tax and To Bed with Grand Music. The period 1945–8 in Britain can now be seen as one of some extraordinary achievements, the most important being the creation of the NHS. But for many of those living in Britain at the time it was an age of austerity, punctuated by regular crises. Wartime rationing not only continued, but its range was broadened. The 1945 Labour victory was based on a broad popular wish to transform the equality of wartime sacrifice into a fairer peacetime society. But the combined effects of rationing and of income tax meant that life for the middle classes was far more austere than in the 1930s, while working-class living standards were higher. And successive crises highlighted divisions in the government and cast doubt on its competence, whether in running the coal industry or the whole economy.
Author
English journalist, radio panelist, and novelist: she also wrote literary biography, plays, and short stories. Laski was born to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals: Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather, and socialist thinker Harold Laski her uncle. She was educated at Lady Barn House School and St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith. After a stint in fashion, she read English at Oxford, then married publisher John Howard, and worked in journalism. She began writing once her son and daughter were born. A well-known critic as well as a novelist, she wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ecstasy (1962) explored intense experiences, and Everyday Ecstasy (1974) their social effects. Her distinctive voice was often heard on the radio on The Brains Trust and The Critics; and she submitted a large number of illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary. An avowed atheist, she was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Her play, The Offshore Island, is about nuclear warfare.
