OUR TIMES, the age of Elizabeth II

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, there were many who proclaimed that a new Elizabethan Age had begun. Few could have any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that were going to take place, in Britain and around the world. The collapse of British power in the world and the near-evaporation of its wealth were established facts, but few people had even begun to understand them. In the third book in A.N. Wilson’s acclaimed histories, Our Times follows the beginnings of modern Britain from the 1950s with the Suez crisis, immigration, the Angry Young Men and Harold Macmillan, to the Sixties and changes in attitudes towards divorce and homosexuality, the rise of satire and the boom in pop music and fashion. Through the Seventies, with Vietnam and the Cold War looming large, and the Labour government that ushered in the Winter of Discontent, to the Thatcher government of the Eighties and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which signalled the end of a political era in Britain, up to the current period, Wilson argues, of unprecedented peace and prosperity.