Author:Christopher Lee,Anna Massey,Robert Powell
All five volumes from the landmark BBC radio series This Sceptred Isle: The Twentieth Century
Christopher Lee's vivid, compelling history tells the story of Britain from the death of Queen Victoria to the dawning of a new millennium. This collection includes the original volumes 1-5:
1901-1919: The Victorian era comes to an end, Suffragettes demand 'Votes for Women', the Titanic sinks and the Great War casts a long shadow.
1919-1939: Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour PM, millions of workers take industrial action during the General Strike, Wall Street crashes and Hitler rises to power.
1939-1959: The horrors of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, Indian independence, the founding of the NHS, the beginning of a new Elizabethan age and the Space Race.
1959-1979: War in Vietnam, Profumo causes a scandal, the Beatles generate worldwide hysteria, Britain joins Europe and Thatcherism is born.
1979-1999: The nation celebrates a fairytale royal wedding, Argentine troops invade the Falklands, disaster strikes at Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall falls - and as the year 2000 approaches, construction begins on London's Millennium Dome.
Narrated by Anna Massey, with additional readings by Robert Powell, this is the definitive radio account of one of the most exciting and fast-moving periods in the history of the United Kingdom.
NB: Due to the age of these recordings, sound quality may vary
Production credits
Written by Christopher Lee
Narrated by Anna Massey, with additional readings by Robert Powell
Produced by Pete Atkin
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 30 August-31 December 1999
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 SolidGuy 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 CommonsIn 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.
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 3.0Standing 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 TimesPraise for Byron's War: Indispensable
—— Literary ReviewThe 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 HistoryColin 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 NewspaperThe 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 , GuardianInteresting and nuanced.
—— Literary Review[A] superb oral history… Interspersed with social commentary and pages of sprightly autobiography.
—— Ian Thomson , TabletIn 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 SupplementHomecoming 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 , GuardianAn extraordinarily detailed and diverse portrait of the Windrush generation through oral histories
—— Reader's DigestNora 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 writerTo 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 EarthAs 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 TorturersNora 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'