1922 was a year of great upheaval. The events that took place then shaped the entire rest of the twentieth century and in many cases continue to affect us even today, a full hundred years later.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed after six centuries. The British Empire began to shake, from Ireland to India. New states and new policies emerged. The Soviet Union was established, while Mussolini's Italy became the first fascist state. And Greece plunged into mourning with the Asia Minor Catastrophe...

The tomb of Tutankhamun was unveiled, and the use of insulin revolutionized medicine. And in Munich, a young demagogue named Adolf Hitler spent a brief time in prison...

Nick Rennison's book brings this significant year back to life, a year that changed the world. It gives us an insight into what people's lives were like then – what they sang, which celebrities they admired, what they feared, what they dreamed – while also unfolding before us the events that shook their everyday lives and laid the foundations for the upheaval that would follow in the tumultuous twentieth century.

1922 is not a faded photograph of the past. It is our own life – just before it became ours. According to the famous saying of British author Leslie Poles Hartley, "the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." A century later, the events of 1922 continue to exert many and varied influences. Nick Rennison presents snapshots of a past that is astonishingly similar to today in a way that is both enlightening and entertaining.