The Prime Ministers with Nick Robinson

Oct 5, 2024 5:28 AM

Author:Nick Robinson,Nick Robinson,Full Cast

In the Complete Series 1 and 2 of this fascinating and absorbing Radio 4 series, the BBC's Nick Robinson explores how Prime Ministers have used their power and responded to the great challenges of their time.

In the first series he explores the premiership of Sir Robert Walpole; the first and longest-serving prime minister; Lord North; remembered as the prime minister who lost America; Sir Robert Peel; who put national interest before party; Lord Palmerston; who cultivated a cavalier image and dominated mid-Victorian politics; Benjamin Disraeli turned his skills as a novelist to politics and became Britain’s first Jewish-born prime minister; David Lloyd George, Welsh radical who set up the early welfare state, became a presidential PM in the First World War and split the Liberal party; and Stanley Baldwin, the first prime minister to master radio broadcasting, his notion of Englishness shaped inter-war Britain.Clement Attlee, who lacked any charisma, but created the modern welfare state and managed the big political beasts in his Cabinet.

In the second series he takes a look at William Pitt the Younger, who became Prime Minister aged only 24 and held the post for almost 19 years in total; Earl Grey, who passed the Great Reform Act and abolished slavery in the British Empire; William Gladstone was our oldest ever premier and finally left Downing Street for the last time aged 84.Herbert Asquith, who had the longest uninterrupted spell in office among twentieth century prime ministers until Margaret Thatcher; Ramsay MacDonald, who became the first Labour Prime Minister in 1924, but seven years later came to be seen as a traitor by his party; Harold Macmillan took over from Eden after Britain’s humiliation in the Suez crisis, and whose upbeat approach earned him the nickname of ‘Supermac’; Harold Wilson captured the mood for change in the 1960s, but his two terms at Number 10 were increasingly dominated by Britain’s economic problems; and Edward Heath, who took Britain into the EEC (now the European Union) in 1973, which still divides opinion.

Reviews

Brilliant, insightful, terse, apposite, daring, and transformative. A must read to understand both the past and the future

—— Danny Dorling, author of All That Is Solid

Guy Standing brings great historical knowledge, political insight, and passion to documenting the market enclosures of our common wealth: the great unacknowledged scourge of our time. Plunder of the Commons is both a troubling exposé and a practical-minded call to reclaim the commons for ourselves and posterity. Sitting politicians will ignore this stirring book at their peril. Incoming reformers will learn how we might transform our predatory system of economics and the complicit political culture.

—— David Bollier, Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and author of Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons

In an era of intensifying privatisation, we're rapidly losing sight of the idea that there are things that can be shared communally without being owned by anybody, things that stand outside of the market system - for example rivers, forests, and other natural resources. Many of them have already been sold off to private interests, and most of the rest are being pursued. This incendiary book exposes this process and explores its corrosive effect on society and resource maintenance.

This clear and radical exposition is a call for the defence of the commons, and one of the most important books I've read in years.

—— Brian Eno

In this majestic work, Guy Standing not only chronicles the historic plundering of our common wealth. More importantly, he shows how we can reclaim that wealth to address our most urgent contemporary problems: economic insecurity and ecological destruction. This is history, analysis and vision, all at their very best.

—— Peter Barnes, author of Capitalism 3.0

Standing not only wants to remind us how much common land in Britain has been enclosed by the wealthy few. His vision of the commons is extremely capacious...his provocation could hardly be timelier

—— Duncan Kelly , Financial Times

Praise for Byron's War: Indispensable

—— Literary Review

The Windrush generation’s voices are rarely heard, but Grant’s anthology is informative and funny, a well-researched window into a vanished world.

—— Sarah Hughes , i

[An] impressive work of oral history.

—— BBC History

Colin Grant has interviewed and collected nearly 200 voices from [the Windrush] era, from all walks of life, including policemen and fascists. It's quite a feat.

—— Bernardine Evaristo , i Newspaper

The structure of Homecoming gives its subjects space to speak for themselves, with each vignette providing a glimpse into little known history… Grant’s collection of voice…exposes effectively the cruel logic of Britain’s legacy of domination.

—— Renni Eddo-Lodge , Guardian

Interesting and nuanced.

—— Literary Review

[A] superb oral history… Interspersed with social commentary and pages of sprightly autobiography.

—— Ian Thomson , Tablet

In Homecoming… Colin Grant collates fragments from several hundred interviews, first-hand and archival, with a cross-section of Caribbean immigrants to Britain from the 1940s and early 60s, and allows his subjects to speak for themselves in idiosyncratic statements that refuse to be co-opted into a generalized account of immigrant experience… A fascinatingly varied tapestry emerges of why people came, what they made of it when they got here, and how they related both their Caribbeanness and their blackness.

—— Lloyd Bradley , Times Literary Supplement

Homecoming is an important book which records the voice of a generation as they fade into history... here we can listen to that generation telling its story in its own words.

—— Richard Hopton , Country & Town House

[Homecoming] artfully break the silence surrounding these unheralded lives [of the Windrush generation] and is essential reading for those who wish to know and honour them

—— Sara Collins, author of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON , Guardian

An extraordinarily detailed and diverse portrait of the Windrush generation through oral histories

—— Reader's Digest

Nora Krug has created a beautiful visual memoir of a horrific time in history. A time that torments us to this day. Asking questions and searching for the truth, she will not turn away from the legacy of her family and her country. She asks the question of how any of us survive our family history. Ultimately, the only course is not to veil the answers

—— Maira Kalman, American illustrator, artist and writer

To belong to a place is not to be able to choose what it takes from you. But we can choose what we take from it. Nora Krug takes from her German homeland, and then gives to us, a sense of what it is like to be German today, and a guide to how a reckoning with the past can begin

—— Timothy Snyder , author of On Tyranny and Black Earth

As the Jewish heir of grandparents who themselves had to flee the upsurge of fascism in their German homelands, I found granddaughter Nora Krug's heartrending investigation of her own family's painstakingly occluded history through those years especially moving. But as an American living through these, our very own years of a seemingly inexorable drift into one's still not quite sure what, I found Krug's achingly realized graphic memoir downright unsettling, for what will our own grandchildren one day make of us and our own everyday compromises and failures to attend?

—— Lawrence Weschler , author of Calamities of Exile and A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers

Nora Krug's book Heimat is a heart-wrenching, suspenseful and fascinating odyssey that straddles, and seeks to uncover, an uncharted, inaccessible, unfathomable past. It is a kaleidoscope of interrupted lives, leading inexorably to its ultimate conclusion. I couldn't stop reading it

—— Hava Beller, Director of 'The Restless Conscience'

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