I do not wish to disparage this volume or belittle the enormous amount of work that Professor Harrison has clearly put into it. Though I lived through the entire period as an adult and was often in close touch with most of the principal actors (and actresses, both literal and figurative), Harrison's book taught me a lot I did not know and I am very glad to have it. But I question its practical use, in some ways, to Oxford undergraduates or indeed others taking a history degree today. They are often, I find, surprisingly ignorant of even salient events more than a generation ago. The virtue of chronology and a narrative framework, the bones, as it were, of the historical body, its skeleton, is that they make it so much easier to explain what happened, and to bring to significant life half-forgotten events. In the 1950s, I often heard the Commons chant such jeering phrases as "Groundnuts!" "False teeth" and "Suez". Catch-phrases in the 1960s included "He would say that, wouldn't he?" Hard to tell what they meant from this account. Mandy Rice-Davies does not pop up in this index, though Rice Krispies do. The lugubrious figure of Colonel George Wigg MP, so important at times in the 1960s, is not there, though Kenneth Williams, the comic actor, merits five appearances. Suez destroyed the Eden government in January 1957 (I remember it vividly and wrote an instant book about it, my first, which came out just before the poor sick man resigned) but it is not properly explained here, nor why Churchill said: "I would not have dared go in, but, being in, I would not have dared to come out." The Macmillan government, a strong one in its day, was destroyed by Profumo. But the Affair is not explained, especially the significance of the lie in a Personal Statement. Christine Keeler is referred to minimally as "model and showgirl", without explaining how ravishing she then was (I met her at the time). As Jack Profumo said to me years later, "There was no resisting her". I wonder, if Professor Harrison had been writing the late-Victorian volume, how he would have dealt with Kitty O'Shea.

Again, I found the treatment of Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife policy in 1968-9 confusing and inadequate, due to its lack of a narrative approach. Yet its failure destroyed Wilson's government the following year, the first of three occasions in which the unions smashed to pieces democratically elected governments, the other two being Heath's in 1974 and Jim Callaghan's in 1979. Throughout the book the significance of the unions at that time is underrated. In the post-war period, Britain was not "seeking a role" — that was merely a smart-aleck remark of Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State — but seeking a living, with diminished resources and a vanishing empire. The task was made infinitely more difficult by the huge legal powers handed over to the unions by Attlee in 1945-7, later enhanced by Wilson and Michael Foot in the mad years 1974-6. This enabled idiotic union demagogues, such as Hugh Scanlon, to destroy the West Midlands car industry and British shipbuilding, once the world's largest, and to subject the nation to what I called "the Brotherhood of National Misery".

In 1951, Churchill was unwilling, or felt himself unable, to enact another Trades Disputes Act, as he had done in 1927. It became the prevailing wisdom, especially after Heath's feeble attempt, ending in the three-day week, that unions could not be subjected to the law. Margaret Thatcher cut through this nonsense in the early 1980s, and proved in two epic battles that they could, in the process destroying the two most powerful unions, the printers and the miners. The way was thus open for Britain to move to a new level of prosperity, with financial services being the largest and most valuable single industry. This satisfactory solution was in turn destroyed by the folly of the politicians and the greed of the bankers — but that is the subject of a different volume, to be written perhaps in the second decade of the 21st century. What is clear to me is that the ultimate failure of the unions to impose syndicalism on our parliamentary system ought to have been the main theme of this period, the second half of the 20th century. But it is not told, and splitting the volume into two, at the hinge-point, makes it impossible to tell.

One final point. Harrison appears to find historical sociology more interesting than history proper. So perhaps his volume should have been called The United Kingdom 1957-70: A Social History. Like the vast majority of sociologists, he has left-leaning views, which occasionally obtrude. Thus in his preface, thanking American helpers, he writes: "The warmth in personal relations generated by such individual acts of kindness helps to scale down the huge damage the USA's reputation incurred worldwide with its friends after 2003." If this means what I think it means, it is foolish and quite inappropriate in such a work. I doubt if J. M. Roberts, had he lived, would have passed it. Still, A. J. P. Taylor would have laughed.