She came to the throne in 1952 when Britain had a far-flung empire, sweets were rationed, mums stayed home and kids played on bombsites. Seventy years on, everything has changed utterly - except the Queen herself, ageing far more gracefully than the fractious nation over which she so lightly presides.
How did we get from there to here in a single reign? To cancel culture, anti-vaxxers and Twitterfeeds? Matthew Engel tells the story - starting with the years from Churchill to Thatcher - with his own light touch and a wealth of fascinating, forgotten, often funny detail.
By:
Matthew Engel
Imprint: Atlantic Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: Main
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 153mm,
Spine: 39mm
Weight: 867g
ISBN: 9781786496676
ISBN 10: 1786496674
Pages: 640
Publication Date: 29 November 2022
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
1: God save the . . . 2: The state of her realm, 1952 3: The crowning glory 4: What's on tonight? 5: Women and children 6: The moral tone 7: The immoral tone 8: Let him have it, Goddard 9: Shoulders back! 10: Summoned by buzzers 11: Years of living dangerously 12: The reign of error 13: The young ones 14: The newcomers 15: Reach for the sky 16: Of dukes and debs 17: So good 18: Keep going well 19: Wives and servants 20: C'mon, little miss, let's do the twist 21: Goodbye to all that 22: Read all about it! 23: They love us, yeah, yeah, yeah 24: Enough rope 25: The last from the past 26: Mickey Mouse and Rattin 27: Up, up and away 28: If you can meet with triumph and disaster 29: Smashing the crockery 30: Ye Blocks, ye Stones 31: Closing time 32: .A woman's work 33: Down with skools 34: The past blasters 35: Now we are forty 36: The faint echoes of empire 37: The moon, money and Murdoch 38: Is the show really over? 39: Listen to reason 40: The iceman cometh 41: Everybody out 42: Down among the dead elms 43: And the bands played on 44: We're in 45: He's out 46: It's that man again 47: Change and decay 48: Anarchy on the King's Road 49: Heatwave and humiliation 50: Flaps, sir! 51: The land of lost content 52: Mark the herald angels sing 53: The girl that I marry 54: The madman of Kampala 55: But this is home 56: Weirder still and weirder 57: The people's pleasures 58: Hearth and health 59: The eerie quiet, the bitter harvest 60: Change and echoes 61: The woman's hour
Matthew Engel is a journalist and author. He has written for the Guardian and Financial Times, among other publications, and was the editor of the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack for twelve years. His books include Eleven Minutes Late and Engel's England.
Reviews for The Reign: Life in Elizabeth's Britain: Part 1: The Way it Was, 1952-79
Matthew Engel's The Reign delivers equally sharp observations of Teddy Boys, hanged murderers, the British Empire, swinging London, National Service and Mrs Thatcher's ascent to power, noting that the City was euphoric - the post-war consensus had ended. It is a powerful illumination of a lost world that is nevertheless part of living memory. -- Simon Heffer * 'Books of the year', Daily Telegraph * Masterly... Consistently entertaining, frequently surprising and sometimes provocative. -- Peter Wilby * 'Books of the Year', New Statesman * A joyous new book on post-war Britain. * Daily Mail * Full of richly revealing stories and quotidian detail, laced with incisive but humane judgements, and never missing the big picture of a country where the pace of social change was rapidly quickening - Matthew Engel has given us a tour de force about post-war Britain which delights and illuminates on every page. -- David Kynaston A pure delight. There is a gem on every page. -- Peter Hennessy I really enjoyed this romp through the headlines, partly because Matthew Engel is such an amusing writer and partly because all sixty-one of his chapters come up like three-minute songs on the jukebox - soon over and always time for just one more... Engel thinks like a journalist but writes like a raconteur. * Literary Review * The best feature writer of his generation, Engel really scores in his attention to the minutiae of lived experience... And he has a journalist's eye for the killer detail. * The Tablet *
