SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018**TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review'Lyrical, full of wi...

Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024, Irish Book AwardsShortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2025Shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize 2025How far would you go for the missing?Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood and emigration. She traces a history of ...

Of the countries that remained neutral during the Second World War, none was more controversial than Ireland, with accusations of betrayal and hypocrisy poisoning the media. Whereas previous histories of Ireland in the war years have focused on high politics, That Neutral Island brings to life the atmosphere of a country forced to live under rationing, heavy censorship and the threat of invasion. It unearths the motivations of those thousands who left Ireland to fight in the British forces...

Clair Wills's The Best Are Leaving is an important and wide-ranging study of post-war Irish emigrant culture. Wills analyses representations of emigrants from Ireland and of Irish immigrants in Britain across a range of discourses, including official documents, sociological texts, clerical literature, journalism, drama, literary fiction, and popular literature and film. This book, written by a leading critic of Irish literature and culture, discusses topics such as the loss of the finest p...

Brought to you by Penguin.Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024, Irish Book AwardsShortlisted for the TLS Ackerley Prize 2025How far would you go for the missing?Blending private and public history, cultural analysis, family memoir and autobiography, Clair Wills explores profound questions about memory, loss, motherhood and emigration. She traces a history of sexual secrecy through four generatio...

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. This edition also includes an extra chapter charting the course from Blair to Brexit.It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders think they know what the...

**WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING****WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY***Book of the year: The Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Evening Standard*'Outstanding . . . We still live in the society that was shaped by Clement Attlee' Robert Harris, Sunday Times'The best book in the ...

Benjamin Disraeli was the most gifted parliamentarian of the nineteenth century and a superb orator, writer and wit - but how much do we really know about the man behind the words?'As Douglas Hurd and Edward Young point out in their splendidly written, finely judged and thoroughly persuasive book, a vast chasm yawned between the real Disraeli and his posthumous reinvention' Dominic Sandbrook, SUNDAY TIMES'Not only, they tell us in this vigorously debunking ...

1914 dawned with Britain at peace, albeit troubled by faultlines within and threats without: Ireland trembled on the brink of civil war; suffragette agitation was assuming an ever more violent hue; and suspicions of Germany's ambitions bred a paranoia that was expressed in a rash of 'invasion scare' literature.Then when shots rang out in Sara-jevo on 28 June, they set in train a tumble of diplomatic dominos that led to Britain declaring war on Germany.Nigel Jones depicts ev...

Elected in a surprise landslide in 1945, Clement Attlee was the first ever Labour leader to command a majority government. At the helm for twenty years, he remains the longest-serving leader in the history of the Labour Party. When he was voted out in 1951, he left with Labour's highest share of the vote before or since. And yet today he is routinely described as 'the accidental Prime Minister'. A retiring man, overshadowed by the flamboyant Churchill during the Second World War, he is dim...

The first biography of Airey Neave, Colditz escapee, MI6 officer, mastermind of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership campaign and on the verge of being her first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when he was brutally murdered in the palace of Westminster by the INLA.On 30 March 1979 for the first time in more than 100 years an MP was killed by a car bomb in the precincts of the House of Commons. Airey Neave was a loyal Tory backbencher who had last held ministerial office in 1959. ...

Eamon de Valera – 'The Long Fellow' – remains a towering presence whose shadow still falls over Irish life. The history of Ireland for much of the twentieth century is the history of de Valera.From the 1916 Rising, the troubled Treaty negotiations and the Civil War, right through to his retirement after a longer period in power than any other 20th-century leader, Eamon de Valera has both defined and divided Ireland. He was directly responsible for the Irish Constitution, Fianna Fai...