Shephard rounds up Employment
The Government has scrapped the Employment Department and divided its duties between the Department for Education and the Department of Trade and Industry. In this week's Cabinet reshuffle, Gillian...
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IQ tests just the job
IQ tests taken by ten-year-olds should replace current school and university exams because "IQ is the single best predictor of job performance and productivity", an academic argues in this week's...
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Blimp, Jeeves and Wooster
Correlli Barnett argues that Britain failed to reinvent itself after the war partly because of its inept and liberal elite. When Britain under its new Labour Government made the transition from war...
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Our noble cause
David Cannadine argues that their lordships have gained prestige just as the Commoners have lost it. After the general election of 1945, as after the "People's Budget" of 1909, there were those who...
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So what do you do, Mr Major?
As John Major resumes normal life at No 10, Peter Hennessy helpfully shows how the function of premiership has changed since the 1940s. This is a very odd moment to be discussing the power of the...
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Hear, hear and over there
Samuel Beer discerns the Americanisation of British politics and the decline of party government. Recently a British journalist recalled that Baroness Thatcher had once said that it would be a great...
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The Institute of Contemporary British History's Anniversary Conference: Britain 1945-95
Britain has changed profoundly in the 50 years since the end of the second world war. When the Institute of Contemporary British History was founded in 1986 by Peter Hennessy and myself, serious...
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Feeding the enemy
Noel Annan discusses the conflicting aims of the allied occupiers of Germany. When prime minister Attlee and foreign secretary Bevin returned to Potsdam after the general election in 1945, British...
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A prefabricated brave new world
W. G. Runciman claims that the real revolution in British society occurred after the first, not the second, world war. After the first world war, the hopes of the electorate for a new and better...
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With friends like these . . .
John Charmley argues that Britain failed to perceive the dangers in its 'special relationship' with the US. Between 1940 and 1957 successive British governments imagined that they could use American...
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Mourning Britain's new dawn
John Ramsden suggests that the postwar era in Britain really came to an end with the death of Churchill in January 1965. With the passage of time, "post-war" has become more or less synonymous with "...
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Slow on the uptake
Eric Roll lists the errors in Britain's postwar economic policy. First one cautionary remark: hindsight can show what should not have been done and what should have been done; but it does not...
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History as it is bought
John Campbell argues that academics should value the popular appeal of biography. Political biography, as a form of history, comes in for a lot of criticism these days. But serious questions are...
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Learning to love biographers
Ben Pimlott stands up for a derided bunch of individuals. A colleague recently told me a story that could have been meant to put me my place. He had been talking over the brandy at an international...
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Silence greets Leviathan
As the state swelled in the 1940s, political theory retreated into the shadows. Jose Harris explains why. A striking feature of political life in Britain from the mid-17th to the early 20th century...