All In It Together: England in the Early 21st Century

Description

‘Turner’s seductive blend of political analysis, social reportage and cultural immersion puts him wonderfully at ease with his readers’ – David Kynaston

‘Reading Alwyn Turner’s account of life in the first two decades of the 21st century is a bit like trying to recall a dream from three nights ago … uncannily familiar, but the details are downright implausible ‘ – Guardian

Weaving politics and popular culture into a mesmerising tapestry, historian Alwyn Turner tells the definitive story of the Blair, Brown and Cameron years. Some details may trigger a laugh of recognition (the spectre of bird flu; the electoral machinations of Robert Kilroy-Silk). Others are so surreal you could be forgiven for blocking them out first time around (did Peter Mandelson really enlist a Candomble witch doctor to curse Gordon Brown’s press secretary?).

The deepest patterns, however, only reveal themselves at a certain distance. Through the Iraq War and the 2008 crash, the rebirth of light entertainment and the rise of the ‘problematic’, Turner shows how the crisis in the soul of a nation played out in its daily dramas and nightly distractions.

Alwyn Turner is best known for his trilogy of books about Britain in the last decades of the 20th century: Crisis? What Crisis? (2008), Rejoice! Rejoice! (2010) and A Classless Society (2013). He has appeared on Panorama, The Moral Maze, Today and Richard and Judy, and written for the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the Financial Times.