The fall and rise of the English upper class explores the role traditionalist worldviews, articulated by members of the historic upper-class, have played in British society in the shadow of her imperial and economic decline in the twentieth century. Situating these traditionalist visions alongside Britain’s post-Brexit fantasies of global economic resurgence and a socio-cultural return to a green and pleasant land, Smith examines Britain’s Establishment institutions, the estates of her landed gentry and aristocracy, through to an appetite for nostalgic products represented with pastoral or pre-modern symbolism. It is demonstrated that these institutions and pursuits play a central role in situating social, cultural and political belonging. Crucially these institutions and pursuits rely upon a form of membership which is grounded in a kinship idiom centred upon inheritance and descent: who inherits the houses of privilege, inherits England.

In this wholly original and brilliantly argued book, the author shows that Britons have indeed been preoccupied with class, but in ways that are invariably ignorant and confused.

A rollicking tour of the English country home after World War II, when swinging London collided with aristocratic values As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, its mansions fell and rose. Ancient families were reduced to demolishing the parts of their stately homes they could no longer afford, dukes and duchesses desperately clung to their ancestral seats, and a new class of homeowners bought their way into country life. A delicious romp, Noble Ambitions pulls us into these crumbling halls of power, leading us through the juiciest bits of postwar aristocratic history—from Mick Jagger dancing at deb balls to the scandals of Princess Margaret. Capturing the spirit of the age, historian Adrian Tinniswood proves that the country house is not only an iconic symbol, but a lens through which to understand the shifting fortunes of the British elite in an era of monumental social change.

Forget glossy period dramas, here is the real story of Britain's super-rich from the First World War to the end of the 'roaring' twenties.

First published in 1972, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny became an instant classic of social history - a groundbreaking study of the golden era of an extraordinary and exclusive British institution. Drawing upon extensive paper research and interviews with former nannies and their charges, Gathorne-Hardy offers 'a study of a unique and curious way of bringing up children, which evolved among the upper and upper-middle-classes during the nineteenth century, flourished for approximately eighty years and then, with the Second World War, vanished for ever.' The nanny hereby earns her place in the story of the British Empire; also in the histories of psychology, child-rearing and British ruling class mores. 'Marvellously researched and beautifully written.' W. H. Auden, Observer 'Enough to delight the sternest critic.' Auberon Waugh, Harpers & Queen

Challenging the prevailing view of a modern English culture besotted with its history and aristocracy, Mandler portrays instead a continuously changing society where both intellectual and popular attitudes have only recently turned to admiration.

Although politicians in Britain are now calling for a "classless society," can one conclude, as do many scholars, that class does not matter anymore? Cannadine uncovers the meanings of class for such disparate figures as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Margaret Thatcher and identifies the moments when opinion shifted, such as the aftermath of the French Revolution and the rise of the Labour Party in the early twentieth century.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'There was nothing extraordinary about my childhood or background. And yet I looked in vain for any aspect of my family's story when I went to university to read history, and continued to search fruitlessly for it throughout the next decade. Eventually I realised I would have to write this history myself.' What was it really like to live through the twentieth century? In 1910 three-quarters of the population were working class, but their story has been ignored until now. Based on the first-person accounts of servants, factory workers, miners and housewives, award-winning historian Selina Todd reveals an unexpected Britain where cinema audiences shook their fists at footage of Winston Churchill, communities supported strikers, and where pools winners (like Viv Nicholson) refused to become respectable. Charting the rise of the working class, through two world wars to their fall in Thatcher's Britain and today, Todd tells their story for the first time, in their own words. Uncovering a huge hidden swathe of Britain's past, The People is the vivid history of a revolutionary century and the people who really made Britain great.

Saxton asks why white racism remained an ideological force in America long after the need to justify slavery and Western conquest had disappeared.

It is usual to see the United Kingdom as an island of continuity in an otherwise convulsed and unstable Europe; its political history a smooth sequence of administrations, a story of building a welfare state and coping with decline. But what if Britain's history was approached from a different angle? What if we wrote about it with as we might write the history of Germany, say, or the Soviet Union, as a story of power, and of transformation? David Edgerton's major new book breaks out of the confines of traditional British national history to reveal an unfamiliar place, subject to radical discontinuities. Out of a liberal, capitalist, genuinely global power of a unique kind, there arose from the 1940s a distinct British nation. This was committed to internal change, making it much more like the great continental powers. From the 1970s it became bound up both with the European Union and with foreign capital in new ways. Such a perspective produces new and refreshed understanding of everything from the nature of British politics to the performance of British industry. Packed with surprising examples and arguments, The Rise and Fall of the British Nationgives us a grown-up, unsentimental history, one which is crucial at a moment of serious reconsideration for the country and its future.