Peter Hennessy: 9 books

“The historian,” wrote E. L. Doctorow, “will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” This book sees Peter Hennessy and Robert Shepard combine both approaches with the art of the interviewer, a craft at once sensitive and probing. Reflections collects transcripts...

Despite the “No” vote in the Scottish Independence Referendum of September 2014, the issue of potential Scottish secession from the United Kingdom has likely only just begun. The Kingdom to Come is the first book-length look at the consequences and implications of this momentous event. Peter...

Like so many of the postwar generation in Britain, Peter Hennessy climbed the ladders of opportunity set up by the 1944 Education Act designed to encourage a more meritocratic society. In this highly personal book, Hennessy examines the rise of meritocracy as a concept and the persistence of the shadowy...

Having It So Good evokes Britain emerging from the shadow of war and the privations of austerity and rationing into growing affluence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and now coffee bars of 1950s Britain – and...

Now more than ever, public servants must consider and reassess how to keep moral courage in public life alive. With ethical expectations and needs changing and government policies under increasing moral scrutiny, Claire Foster-Gilbert of Westminster Abbey Institute gathers a series of essays and lectures...

In Distilling the Frenzy, the UK's leading contemporary historian examines the special considerations that apply to writing the history of one's own times, and revisits the grand themes running through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He looks at Britain's persistent impulse to punch well...

  Throughout Britain, Civil Servants are exposed to public scrutiny today in unprecedented ways. What does it mean that the political neutrality of the Civil Service has only been enshrined in law since 2010, nearly 150 years after it was first proposed? Why is it so important for politicians to...

'The Ministry of Defence does not comment upon submarine operations' is the standard response of officialdom to enquiries about the most secretive and mysterious of Britain's armed forces, the Royal Navy Submarine Service. Written with unprecedented co-operation from the Service itself and privileged...

A report in 1833 by a committee of three respected Kingston colonials called for the construction of a limestone penitentiary on Hatter's Bay to the west of the town. Their report contained these words of advice for its future governors: "...[shall] be a place by every means not cruel and not...