A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's' Jonathan Coe, Financial Times 'Vinen has written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it' Daily Telegraph For over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century: a place of mass production and full employment that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic halt in the 1980s. Birmingham has also been a magnet for migration, drawing in people from Wales, Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Indeed, much of British history can be explained, in large measure, with reference to Birmingham. Vinen roots his sweeping story in the experience of individuals. This is a book about figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran Duran, and also about those that everyone ought to have heard of. It captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories in the 1930s to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub in the 1980s - were caught up in the convulsions of social change. Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain does not make sense without it.

This 1995 book is a general study of politics and society in the Fourth Republic and is founded on extensive primary research. It approaches the period in terms of successful conservatism rather than thwarted reform, maintaining that conservatism in France was a more subtle, dynamic force than has previously been appreciated. Not the preserve of any one single party, conservative ideas were often defended by institutions outside the realm of explicit politics altogether, such as business associations, civil service departments and the law courts. It is proposed that conservatives did not simply return to French politics in 1945 untouched by the events of the previous five years. The experiences of Vichy, the occupation and the purges produced new kinds of political synthesis, making conservatives more dynamic and receptive to change than their 'progressive' opponents.

It has long been assumed that large-scale industry was one of the pillars of support for the Vichy regime which ruled France - under the German aegis - from 1940 to 1944. In particular it has been assumed that business used Vichy to reverse the advantages that labour had secured after the election of the Popular Front government in 1936. Richard Vinen argues that this assumption is false. He suggests that large-scale industry, mostly based in northern France, was geographically and psychologically isolated from the preoccupations of a government which was based in the south. Furthermore, business soon became aware of the probability of an allied victory and was consequently eager to distance itself from a government that it saw as doomed. Most important of all, the Popular Front legislation of 1936 had already been undermined by the rearmament programme that preceded the fall of France in 1940.

This is the first general study based on primary research of the reconstruction of conservative parties, business associates, civil service departments and other institutions defending bourgeois interests in the period between 1945 and 1951. French conservatism is presented as a more subtle, dynamic force than has been previously appreciated. It is suggested that the experiences of Vichy, the occupation and the purges inspired new kinds of political synthesis, making conservatives more dynamic and receptive to change than their "progressive" opponents.

The problem with the history of twentieth-century Europe is that everyone thinks they know it. The great stories of the century – the two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazism and communism, female emancipation – seem self-evidently important. But behind the grand narratives, the politics and the ideologies, lies another history: the history of forces that shaped the lives of individual Europeans.

That is the thrust of Richard Vinen's magisterial survey of this uniquely destructive and creative century. It argues that there is no single history that encompasses the experience of all Europeans, but rather a multiplicity of different, partially interlocking, histories. Some of these histories are told here in a book which seeks to root the generalisations of large-scale analysis in the concrete – and sometimes incongruous – details of individual lives. Challenging, informing and revealing, this is history writing at its finest.
 

Winner of the Templer Medal and the Wolfson History Prize Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller Richard Vinen's National Service is a serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of that extraordinary institution, which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself. With great sympathy and curiosity, Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with National Service. This book is fascinating to those who endured or even enjoyed their time in uniform, but also to anyone wishing to understand the unique nature of post-war Britain.

'Fresh, compelling ... an important book, revealing that 50 years on, 1968 is still unfinished business' Andrew Hussey, Financial Times 'A thoughtful, readable account of a moment in history that deserves to be dwelt on' Andrew Marr, The Times 1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications; terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important roots to 1968. Bill Clinton and even Tony Blair are, in many ways, the product of that year. The Long '68 is a striking and original attempt half a century on to show how these events - from anti-war marches in the United States to revolts against Soviet oppression in eastern Europe - which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies that are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time. The book pursues the story into the 1970s to show both the ever more violent forms of radicalization that stemmed from 1968, and the brutal reactions from those in power that brought the era to an end.

A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'A spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain's history without anyone noticing ... This absorbing book shows us how we did it' Observer 'Vinen has written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it' Daily Telegraph For over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England, and central to modern history. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century: a place of mass production, full employment and prosperity that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic halt in the 1980s. For most of that time, Birmingham has also been a magnet for migration, drawing in people from Wales, Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Indeed, much of British history - the passage of the first reform bill, the rise and fall of the Chamberlain dynasty, racial tension - can be explained, in large measure, with reference to Birmingham. Vinen roots his sweeping story in the experience of individuals. This is a book about figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran Duran. It is also about those that everyone ought to have heard of - such as Dick Etheridge, the all-powerful Communist convenor at the Longbridge factory, or Stan Crooke, one of the remarkable West Indians interviewed for the 1960s documentary The Colony. It captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories in the 1930s to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub in the 1980s - were caught up in the convulsions of social change. Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain does not make sense without it. 'There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's' Jonathan Coe, Financial Times

In the summer of 1940, the French army was one of the largest and best in the world, confident of victory. In the space of a few nightmarish weeks all that changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes. Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat. It does so not by looking at political leaders in Vichy or Paris or London but rather at those who were caught up in daily horrors of war. It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman, and the fate of a French woman who gave birth to a German-fathered child as the Americans landed in Normandy. It describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run seeking to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves. It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars. It recounts the fate of a couple of estranged middle-aged Jews, separated by the mobilisation of 1939, who found themselves (in July 1942) on the same train to Auschwitz.Extremely moving and brilliantly readable, The Unfree French is a remarkable addition to the literature of the Second World War.