Innovation

The final volume of Peter Ackroyd's History of England picks up at the close of the Boer War, as Edward VII comes to the throne, and carries the story to the end of the twentieth century. By then Elizabeth II, Edward's great-granddaughter, had reigned for almost fifty years. The book follows a century of sweeping change across the whole period.

Ackroyd covers two world wars and the reigns of four monarchs: Edward VII, George V, George VI and Elizabeth II. He traces the waning of the aristocracy and the rise of the Labour Party, the winning of votes for women, the founding of the National Health Service, the spread of suburbia and the clearing of the slums.

The cultural story runs alongside the political one. Ackroyd moves from the Bloomsbury Group and T.S. Eliot to Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and from the economic gloom after the Second World War to the bright, saturated look of the 1960s, then to free love, punk rock, and the years from Thatcher to Blair. The book is crowded with the people who shaped these decades.