‘The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.’ Thus, more than a century ago, Lytton Strachey began Eminent Victorians. In fact, Strachey offers a model of how to write about the recent past. The trick is to be brief, to be witty and, above all, to be unfair. Caution, balance and an insistence on examining all the facts before reaching a judgement will get us nowhere. There are too many facts and too few theories about Britain since 1990. 

Things are made more difficult because we drop over a historiographical cliff as the 1980s end. Even before Mrs Thatcher came to power, left-wing analysts had started talking about ‘Thatcherism’ and this soon provided an interpretative structure around which everything else revolved – even for authors who argued that there was, in fact, no such thing. And what about the period after Thatcher’s fall? There was a succession of dramatic events – the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the first Gulf War, peace in Northern Ireland and the growth of Islamist terrorism, the financial crash of 2008, the Brexit referendum of 2016 and the Covid pandemic that began in 2019. What ties these events together? What does it all mean? The problem of interpretation is especially acute for those of us whose outlook was so shaped by the dramatic events of the 1980s. Watching British politics in recent years (especially the last ten years) has often felt like being held up by a gunman in a clown mask – I am frightened and angry but I cannot quite take it all seriously.

Brian Harrison began his long and distinguished career with research on the 19th century and later wrote two volumes, dealing with the period from 1951 to 1990, for the New Oxford History of England. This means that his labours on the period covered by this book are mixed with the