Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties - Hardcover

Hennessy, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713995718 ISBN 13: 9780713995718

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2006

Synopsis

Having It So Good evokes Britain emerging from the shadow of war and the privations of austerity and rationing into growing affluence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and now coffee bars of 1950s Britain – and also into the secret Cabinet rooms in which decisions about the British nuclear bomb were taken and plans made for the catastrophe of nuclear war. He brings to life the ageing Churchill, in his last faltering spell as Prime Minister, the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking his country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion, and the rise of ‘Supermac’ Harold Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance. Above all, Having It So Good captures the smell and the flavour of an extraordinary decade in which affluence and anxiety combined to produce their own winds of change.

About this title

Review:

Hennessy combines the balance and authority of a historian with the brilliantly selective eye of the investigative journalist ... if the Gods gossip this is how it would sound

Books of the Year (Philip Ziegler Spectator)

About the Author:

Peter Hennessy was described by the late Ben Pimlott as ‘a political historian and journalist who has himself become something of a national institution’. He is Attlee Professor of History at Queen Mary College, London, and the author of Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (winner of the NCR Prize); the best-selling The Prime Minister and The Secret State (all Penguin). He is a frequent broadcaster and is regularly consulted by all political parties on constitutional and historical questions.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0713995718
• ISBN 13: 9780713995718
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 768