Having it So Good

"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.

ISBN 0141004096   Volumes 1 ISBN13 9780141004099 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 571 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd   Published in London Imprint Penguin Books Ltd   Height (mm) 198 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 129 Publication date 03 May 2007   Spine width (mm) 33 DEWEY 941.0855   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22   Interest age 17 Pages 800

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

 Be the first to write a customer review