''Forget almost everything you thought you knew about Britain ... You will not find a better informed history'' David Goodhart, Evening Standard
''A striking new perspective on our past'' Piers Brendon, Literary Review
From the acclaimed author of Britain''s War Machine and The Shock of the Old, a bold reassessment of Britain''s twentieth century.
It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, from building a welfare state to coping with decline. Nobody would dream of writing the history of Germany, say, or the Soviet Union in this way.
David Edgerton''s major new history breaks out of the confines of traditional British national history to redefine what it was to British, and to reveal an unfamiliar place, subject to huge disruptions. This was not simply
