History, like the present, is always changing. Scholarship on the history of the British Isles is currently experiencing a golden age. The breakdown of modernism and the eclipse of both the Marxist tradition and the 'Whig interpretation' that sees all history as progress, combined with the trajectories of nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, have generated unprecedented intellectual activity. In the final volume of this history of Britain, Robert Skidelsky takes on the question: how successful was Britain in the twentieth century. Taking in the loss of the British Empire, the 'ungovernable' 1970s, Britain's involvement in two world wars and unprecedented social change, this is a comprehensive and fascinating look at Britain's twentieth century.
Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Ecomony at Warwick University. His three-volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983,1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of The World after Communism (1995) and Keynes: The Return of the Master (2009). He was made a life peer in 1991, is a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994.
