From the celebrated author of Never Again and Having It So Good, a
wonderfully vivid new history of Britain in the early 1960s
Harold Macmillan famously said in 1960 that the wind of change was
blowing over Africa and the remaining British Empire. But it was blowing
over Britain too - its society; its relationship with Europe; its
nuclear and defence policy. And where it was not blowing hard enough -
the United Kingdom's economy - great efforts were made to sweep away the
cobwebs of old industrial practices and poor labour relations. Life was
lived in the knowledge that it could end in a single afternoon of
thermonuclear exchange if the uneasy, armed peace of the Cold War tipped
into a Third World War.
In Winds of Change we see Macmillan gradually working out his 'grand
design' - how to be part of both a tight transatlantic alliance and
Europe, dealing with his fellow geostrategists Kennedy and de Gaulle.
The centre of the book is 1963 - the year of the Profumo Crisis, the
Great Train Robbery, the satire boom, de Gaulle's veto of Britain's
first application to join the EEC, the fall of Macmillan and the
unexpected succession to the premiership of Alec Douglas-Home. Then, in
1964, the battle of what Hennessy calls the tweedy aristocrat and the
tweedy meritocrat - Harold Wilson, who would end 13 years of
Conservative rule and usher in a new era.
As in his acclaimed histories of British life in the two previous
decades, Never Again and Having it so Good, Peter Hennessy explains
the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of a nation with
inimitable wit and empathy. No historian knows the by-ways as well the
highways of the archives so well, and no one conveys the flavour of the
period so engagingly. The early sixties live again in these pages.
