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A History of Modern Britain

Andrew Marr

Hardcover | Pages: 629 pages

Rating: 4.02 | 2450 Users | 146 Reviews

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Original Title:	A History of Modern Britain
ISBN:	1405005386 (ISBN13: 9781405005388)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Joseph Stalin, John Maynard Keynes, Tony Blair, John Lennon, Ian Smith, Harold Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mick Jagger, Charles de Gaulle, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Spike Milligan, Saddam Hussein, Nikita Khrushchev, Guy Burgess, Anthony Eden, Friedrich Hayek, Lyndon B. Johnson, Enoch Powell, Harold Macmillan, Tony Benn, David Blunkett, Edward Heath, John Prescott, Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Margaret Thatcher
Setting:	Britain

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In many ways this is quite a conservative history of modern Britain. My knowledge of that history isn’t brilliant, and so this did serve the purpose I read it for – to get a thumbnail overview. That said, it must be remembered this is written by a journalist, rather than an historian and I think that shows.

So, what does that mean? I think people might well disagree with me that this was conservative – I mean, there are places where he clearly supports the path taken by the Labour Party over the Conservatives – but that isn’t really what I mean. There are also parts where he is literally quite conservative – particularly in his rather standard attack on the move to more progressive education practices from the 1960s onward. What is never acknowledged in these rants – they do tend to be rants, unfortunately – is that from about the 1960s on mass education started to really ‘bite’. This meant that entire groups of people whose families had never before been educated were now being educated. He mentions that the upper classes were still being educated in pretty much the same way as they always had been – but that is precisely my point. The upper classes were arriving at school with academic capital that simply wasn’t available to the others in society confronting mass education. That teachers found they needed to ‘start where the students were at’ and to present ‘student-centred lessons’ is so often, by conservatives at least, presented as the root of all evil – but in fact, what else could have been done? The fact is that what is so often advocated as traditional values or common sense approaches to education could not be either in the case of the students affected in this entirely new world. Tradition is hardly relevant in a completely new situation.

But even this is not really the conservatism I’m referring to. Another aspect of it is the book's very close focus on the history of great men (and woman – given Thatcher) as the kind of history that truly deserves attention. The vast majority of this book is a telling of the story of the governing of Britain. And this is fine – this is one of the things I was hoping to get out of the book – but it really does position the book fairly squarely in a particular genre of history telling. The idea that history is really the story of the great and powerful.

Now, some may argue that he talks of the influence of music and fashion and the arts (particularly drama and humour) and that these add detail to the overall picture being presented. My concern is that these would, being generous, account for only under a third of the total narrative presented here (I would need to check, but I would suspect I'm being incredibly generous). And again, even in the story of the lower middle class boys going on to become The Beatles, say, we haven’t really left the realm of the great and powerful, have we?

There is a nice bit which I think shows what this book could have been. Following the war there was a severe shortage of housing. At the same time, as Van Morrison would say, “all the soldiers came marching home / Love looks in their eyes.” Britain witnessed both a housing shortage and a baby boom. So, people were forced to live with their parents and in-laws – and so Marr speculates this might help to explain the popularity of the mother-in-law joke well into the 1970s. That is the sort of thing that makes an interesting history – life situations that directly impact on the kinds of lives that can be lived in a society and therefore that help to explain the national character. However, there was far too little of this. Too much time was spent looking at the decline of the Empire, obviously important, but perhaps not really something that gives as much insight into the British character as is often believed.

This history is also conservative in quite another way. I got the impression the whole way though that how things turned out was being presented by the author as the only way things could have turned out. The Thatcher revolution was not overturned by the Labour Party once it came to power in any meaningful sense, and so the Thatcher revolution must have been both necessary and inevitable. I'm not really arguing with this, but more with what he does then in leading up to the Thatcher revolution. He uses it to explain the previous history of Britain – which is either progressing by moving towards this inevitable revolution or pointlessly acting as a counter-revolutionary force whenever it seems to be backsliding away from the vision splendid that would be Thatcher's Britain. Such post-hoc explanations make for good stories – all that journalists are finally interested in, as they tell you themselves – but I feel they make for quite poor histories.

Like I said, I was looking for a book that gave me a helicopter view of the history of modern Britain. And that is what I got with this one. This starts virtually at the end of the Second World War and ends with Gordon Brown. It is a quick read, for what it sets out to do. But there is no question it could have been so much more.

Define Based On Books A History of Modern Britain

Title	:	A History of Modern Britain
Author	:	Andrew Marr
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 629 pages
Published	:	May 17th 2007 by MacMillan (first published 2007)
Categories	:	History. Nonfiction. Politics. Historical

Rating Based On Books A History of Modern Britain

Ratings: 4.02 From 2450 Users | 146 Reviews

Write-Up Based On Books A History of Modern Britain

This will probably be the thickest book I read this year.Similar to my experience reading 'Cameron at 10' last year, learning about modern British history made me feel like I was at that bit of an SFF novel where a character learns about the background of their world and how the current crises have come about. Britain's confused relationships with America and continental Europe are a major thread throughout our post-WW2 history.Major catastrophes such as the Second World War cause major changes:

The book kept me intrigued and glued for the first part of the British story after the Second World War till the 1960's, but then it started to read like a political story of Britain which I found difficult to follow. There was far too much focus on politicians for my taste. More analysis and less personality focus would have been better in my opinion as Andrew Marr has an interesting view on events. I don't know what kept him from elaborating more?

In the UK Andrew Marr is a well-known political journalist and TV presenter, and doubtless some people will question the content of this book on the basis it was not written by a professional historian. Personally I think there is plenty of solid research in here, and the author also brings a journalists writing skills to the text.Marrs background does show through in a couple of ways though. Although he does cover social trends and the life of ordinary Britons, the bulk of the book is taken up

This will probably be the thickest book I read this year.Similar to my experience reading 'Cameron at 10' last year, learning about modern British history made me feel like I was at that bit of an SFF novel where a character learns about the background of their world and how the current crises have come about. Britain's confused relationships with America and continental Europe are a major thread throughout our post-WW2 history.Major catastrophes such as the Second World War cause major changes:

Thrift stores fucking rock. Somebody ditches a mint condition of a relatively new publication like this, and I get to snatch it up for a buck ninety-nine. Skip the daily trip to Starbucks and it slides right by the budget counter. That's one of the Friday evening rituals after workhit the used-book section at the Double-V and peruse the shelves for that sweet find that flicks the switch sending an I wanna DANCE! tingle coursing up and down the leg. My heart belches and my facial muscles spring

Finally, Mr Marr and I are parting ways. I started this in February(!) and am ashamed to say I've only just finished it. I wasn't very disciplined, it spent months languishing on my bedside table as I cheated on it with easier reads (or books that weren't so heavy/I could hold open with one hand whilst shovelling food into my face).I must say though, the length of time it took me read it is in no way due to it being a chore to read. My modern history is a bit appalling, I can tell you

Nice to read some history I can have memories of. Love the summarises and all the book reference tips.