Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Thatcher's Britain
Britain's first female prime minister remains a political figure of almost mythical proportions. Margaret Thatcher divided a political nation, became a cultural icon, and was the longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century. Her period in government coincided with extraordinary changes in British society and in Britain's place in the world. Thatcher's Britaintells the story of Thatcherism for a generation with no personal memories of the 80s, as well as for those who want to revisit the polemics of their youth. It seeks to rescue Thatcher from being seen as John the Baptist for Tony Blair, stresses that Thatcherism was not a timeless phenomenon, but rooted in the 70s and 80s, and focuses our attention away from her legend, to what her government actually did during this tumultuous period in British history.
A History In Fragments
The problem with the history of twentieth-century Europe is that everyone thinks they know it. The great stories of the century - the two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazism and communism, female emancipation - seem self-evidently important. But behind the grand narratives, the politics and the ideologies, lies another history: the history of forces that shaped the lives of individual Europeans. That is the thrust of Richard Vinen's magisterial survey of this uniquely destructive and creative century. It argues that there is no single history that encompasses the experience of all Europeans, but rather a multiplicity of different, partially interlocking, histories. Some of these histories are told here in a book which seeks to root the generalisations of large-scale analysis in the concrete - and sometimes incongruous - details of individual lives. Challenging, informing and revealing, this is history writing at its finest.
National Service
SUNDAY TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR and FINANCIAL TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 WINNER OF THE TEMPLER MEDAL AND THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller Richard Vinen's new book is a serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of National Service, an extraordinary institution which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself. With great sympathy and curiosity, Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with National Service. Millions of teenagers were thrown together and under often brutal conditions taught to obey orders and to fight. The luck of the dra...
France, 1934-1970
This book describes a period during which France teetered on, and sometimes over, the brink of civil war. It shows how the rise of fascism, German invasion, the Vichy government, and withdrawal from Empire convinced a significant number of Frenchmen that killing their compatriots was a legitimate way to achieve political ends.
The Unfree French
The swift and unexpected defeat of the French Army in 1940 shocked the nation. This compelling book investigates the impact of the occupation on the people of France and dispels any lingering notion that somehow, under the collaborating government of Marshal Petain, life was quite tolerable for most French citizens.
The Blood of the Colony
The surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire. “We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol. Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers,...
Bourgeois Politics in France, 1945-1951
This is a general study of politics and society in the Fourth Republic founded on extensive primary research. It approaches the period in terms of successful conservatism rather than thwarted reform.
The Human Factor
The Human Factor tells the dramatic story about the part played by political leaders - particularly the three very different personalities of Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher - in ending the standoff that threatened the future of all humanity
Second City
A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's' Jonathan Coe, Financial Times 'Vinen has written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it' Daily Telegraph For over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century: a place of mass production and full employment that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic halt in the 1980s. Birmingham has also been a magnet for...
Making Thatcher's Britain
This book situates the controversial Thatcher era in the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain.
