Book description
When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, many proclaimed the
start of a new Elizabethan Age. Few had any inkling, however, of the
stupendous changes that would take place over the next 50 years, in
Britain and around the world.
In Our Times, A. N. Wilson takes the reader on an
exhilarating journey from that day to this. With his acute eye not
just for the broad social and cultural sweep but also for the telling
detail, he brilliantly distils half a century of unprecedented social
and political change.
Here are the defining events and characters of the modern age, from
the Suez crisis to Vietnam, The Beatles to Princess Diana, the miners'
strike to the Cold War. Here are the Angry Young Men, the satirists of
Beyond the Fringe, Ruth Ellis and the abolition of hanging, the rise
of pop culture and celebrity, industrial unrest and the Winter of
Discontent, the Thatcher era and the eventual collapse of the Soviet
Union. This book will propel you from post-war austerity - an age of
deference in which men wore hats and women wore gloves - through the
alterations in our social landscape to the multi-cultural Britain of
today. Despite the appalling tyrannies that have taken place in the
world, Wilson argues that in the last fifty years Britain has known a
period of prosperity and peace without precedent in its history.
With Our Times, A. N. Wilson triumphantly concludes the
acclaimed trilogy which includes The Victorians and After
the Victorians. It makes compelling reading for anyone
interested in the forces that have shaped our world.
A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College,
Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a
prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an
award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for
much of his work. He lives in North London.
