Dimensions
155 x 238 x 44mm
When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, there were many who proclaimed that a new Elizabethan Age had begun. Few could have any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that were going to take place, in Britain and around the world, during her reign. The third book in A.N. Wilson's acclaimed histories, which has so far included The Victorians and After the Victorians, takes the reader up to the present day in telling the story of how Britain reinvented itself after the loss of Empire and the austerity of the post-war years.
In Our Times we follow the beginnings of modern Britain from the 1950s, with the Suez crisis, immigration, Ruth Ellis and the abolition of hanging, the Angry Young Men and Harold Macmillan, to the Sixties and changes in attitudes towards divorce and homosexuality, the rise of satire and the boom in pop music and fashion. Through the Seventies, with Vietnam and the Cold War looming large, the Labour government and the Winter of Discontent, to the Thatcher era of the Eighties and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite the appalling tyrannies, wars and revolutions taking place in other parts of the world, Wilson argues that Britain has recently known a period of prosperity and peace without precedent in its history.
A.N. Wilson has written a panoramic survey of modern Britain that is at once a personal and reflective account, as well as a commanding and epic portrait of our age.