best of the bars

One of this blog's favourite critics, John Lanchester, writes in the current issue of the LRB about the prospective takeover of Cadbury by the American food giant Kraft.

The takeover bid captures our interest for several reasons. Chocolate is a powerful reminder of our childhoods. Chocolate is 'inarguably' the only food which is better because of industrial manufacturing. And nearly all the great chocolate bars are British:

the first of them, and still my favourite, was Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, invented in 1905. Other great British bars appeared in a burst of heroic creativity in the 1920s and 1930s: the Flake in 1920, Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut in 1928, Fry’s Crunchie in 1929, the Aero in 1935, then in 1937 no fewer than three masterpieces, the Rolo, the Kit Kat and Smarties.