Author(s): Ruth Winstone

Politics

This title brings twentieth-century British politics vividly to life and reveals perspective on the tumultuous events it sought to control, the changes it resisted and the reforms it brought into being. Ruth Winstone retells Britain's history through the great diarists of the last century drawing back the curtain on the lives of political classes, their doubts, ambitions, and emotions. She moves deftly among those in the thick of it, showing the elation anger, doubts, jealousy, joys and fears of those such as Nicolson, Cooper, Channor Macmillan, Castle, Clark, Benn, Campbell, Mullin and Ashdown as they record their own and the nation's triumphs and disasters. To this potent mix she adds the mordant perceptions of observers like Virginia Woolf, Cecil Beaton, Peter Hall and Roy Strong, and the vivid records of everyday life found in the diaries of otherwise ordinary men and women. "Events, Dear Boy, Events" reveals Britain's recent past in the words of the actors who were shaping events of the day as they were happening. This is living real-time history.