How We Got to Where We Are

Peter Ghosh

  • Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-1990 by Peter Clarke
    Allen Lane, 454 pp, £25.00, October 1996, ISBN 0 7139 9071 6

In 1987, David Cannadine concluded an essay on what he saw as the dark and doubtful state of British history with a call to ‘fashion a new version of the national past which can regain its place in our general national culture, and become once again an object of international interest’. A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain. Eight years on – two years longer than it took to commission and publish the entire series of the old Pelican History of England (1949-55) – we see the first fruits of the appointment.

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