When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, few could have any inkling of the stupendous changes that were going to take place in Britain and around the world. In this third book of his acclaimed histories, A. N. Wilson paints a panoramic portrait of the development of modern Britain. He begins in the 1950s with the Suez crisis, immigration, the Angry Young Men and Harold Macmillan, and takes us through the vast cultural changes and pop fashions of the 1960s. He continues through the 1970s, with Vietnam and the Cold War looming large and the Labour government that ushered in the Winter of Discontent. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the ’80s signaled the end of a political era in Britain, leading up to the current period of unprecedented peace and prosperity.
A. N. Wilson is a renowned British journalist and author. He has written several acclaimed biographies, including Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Jesus, and Paul. He taught for seven years at Oxford before becoming a journalist. He has won numerous awards, including the E. M. Forster Award, the Whitbread Biography Award, and the Somerset Maugham Award. A frequent contributor to the Daily Mail, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, Spectator, and Observer, he lives in London.
Geoffrey Howard (a.k.a. Ralph Cosham) (1936–2014) was a British journalist who changed careers to become a narrator and screen and stage actor. He performed in more than one hundred professional theatrical roles. His audiobook narrations were named “Audio Best of the Year” by Publishers Weekly, and he won seven AudioFile Earphones Awards, and in 2013 he won the coveted Audie Award for Best Mystery Narration for his reading of Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery.