Radical Protest and Its Enemies

The Long '68

'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.

Deeply researched, richly detailed and thoroughly absorbing

Fresh, compelling ... an important book, revealing that 50 years on, 1968 is still unfinished business

The 'long 68' saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around 10 million French workers struck 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 68. 
 
THE LONG '68 is a striking and original attempt, half a century on, to show how these events, which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies which are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time.

A Generation in Uniform 1945-1963

National Service

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.

Vinen's clever and careful book is surely the definitive history. The era of national service now seems like ancient history, but from the routines of the parade ground to the horrors of Korea, Vinen restores it to life with a searching eye for detail and impressive human sympathy

Written with compassion and insight, Vinen's book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of postwar Britain

National Service may prove to be the most original social history book of 2014. The book is bigger than its ostensible subject, embracing class, masculinity, sexuality, compliance, rebellion, combat atrocities, petty crime, notions of national identity, group solidarity, the fallibility of memory and what it means to be a man

Vinen has given us the kind of book that every professional historian surely wants to write: not only with a mastery of its voluminous original sources but also a sensitivity to the rich human detail, by turns authoritative, thoughtful, poignant - and funny

I can't recall ever having read so unexpectedly fascinating a book...every single page has something of great interest on it

Richard Vinen is the author of the highly praised A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation (published by Penguin) and Thatcher's Britain. He is Professor of History at King's College London.

Life Under the Occupation

The Unfree French

'Vinen's is an immaculately researched, well-written and original book' Literary Review

Richard Vinen is Reader in History at King&rsquo;s College, University of London. His last book was the highly acclaimed A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century.

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 that all 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.

Richard Vinen

Vinen's biography of the city is a spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham, in his view, has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain's modern industrial, economic, political and cultural history without anyone noticing... This absorbing book shows us how we did it.

Richard Vinen's new history of his native city explains everything ... 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.

[A] sweeping history ... There's a much better story to be told [about Birmingham] - and it's revealed between the covers of this book.

A superb retort to [the] slings and arrows of derision ... Birmingham's very mutability ... is the key to its survival.

Absorbing ... There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's.

Birmingham's ordinariness has prevented us from seeing what is extraordinary in its history. Brummies shaped our everyday world ... Vinen's book provides a template for how we might level up the way we write about England's northern and Midland cities.

Second City makes the case that Brum is, for all its amorphousness, England's second city, and rightly pays tribute to Joe Chamberlain for transforming it through his progressive policies in the 1870s.

A key text for understanding our times ... Highly recommended, truly thought provoking.

PRAISE FOR NATIONAL SERVICE: Written with compassion and insight, Vinen's book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of postwar Britain.

I can't recall ever having read so unexpectedly fascinating a book... every single page has something of great interest on it.

Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain

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 to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub - 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.

Richard Vinen

Praise for Second City

Vinen's biography of the city is a spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham, in his view, has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain's modern industrial, economic, political and cu ...

Richard Vinen's new history of his native city explains everything ... 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.

[A] sweeping history ... There's a much better story to be told [about Birmingham] - and it's revealed between the covers of this book.

Vinen's biography of the city is a spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham, in his view, has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain's modern industrial, economic, political and cu ...

Richard Vinen's new history of his native city explains everything ... 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.

[A] sweeping history ... There's a much better story to be told [about Birmingham] - and it's revealed between the covers of this book.

Vinen's biography of the city is a spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham, in his view, has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain's modern industrial, economic, political and cu ...

Richard Vinen's new history of his native city explains everything ... 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.

[A] sweeping history ... There's a much better story to be told [about Birmingham] - and it's revealed between the covers of this book.

Books by Richard Vinen

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