The New Oxford History of England (NOHE), with its bright pictorial covers, is designed to replace that monumental work. The first volume, Paul Langford’s A Polite and Commercial People: England 1772–1783, was published in 1992; all told there are likely to be a couple of extra volumes as the new series brings the history of England up to the 1990s. Otherwise the space allocations are much as they were in the original: roughly a hundred years per volume for the medieval period, fifty or so from the Tudors onwards, with the time span per volume decreasing for the twentieth century.

But the NOHE is markedly different from its predecessor. In one sense this is inevitable, given that the vast army of professional researchers that has flourished in universities and institutes since World War II has transformed our knowledge of English history. But our concept of what history is has also changed. As the author of the first volume in the NOHE lamented, ‘There is no longer general agreement as what constitutes the proper province of the historian.’ In the original volumes, the dominant style was narrative, the hegemony of political history was unchallenged and social, economic, cultural and religious history were treated as separate, secondary matters. Not so in the NOHE, which is markedly more democratic in approach, just as focused on the doings of the English people as on the history of the English political élite.

This can be seen in the changing demarcation dates for the various volumes. In the original, the scope for nearly every volume was determined by the coronation and the death of kings, at least until the nineteenth century. Not so in the NOHE. The volume on the Normans begins with the completion of the Conquest in 1075 rather than with Hastings and the coronation of William I in 1066; Plantagenet England ends with the Treaty of Bretigny, arguably the highpoint of the English feudal monarchy, not with the death of Edward III seventeen years later, by when it was already in decay; ignoring 1485 as a divide emphasises the Yorkist roots of the New Monarchy; the beginning of the Civil War is preferred to either the execution of Charles I in 1649 or to the restoration of Charles II eleven years later; and the coming to power of Pitt the Younger divides the Hanoverian volumes.

More substantially, thematic chapters far outweigh the political narrative. There are chapters on a whole range of topics – ‘Population and the Black Death’, ‘Religion, Devotion and Dissent’, ‘The Birth of Sensibility’, ‘Industry and Idleness’ – to choose at random from a number of the volumes.

Brian Harrison, in Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970, represents the apogee of this approach. There is no narrative of the rise and fall of governments; even the single chapter devoted to politics seeks not to tell a story but to ‘analyse change in the political structure’s leading components’ executive, parliament, administration and the major parties, particularly the impact on the latter of novel ways of discovering public opinion.

Certainly, the prime ministers of the period were not an impressive lot, and their reputations have mostly declined with time. By 1951 Clement Attlee was past his best, and that judgement is true of Winston Churchill in his final premiership (1951–55); that seemingly eternal best man Anthony Eden was destroyed by illness and the Suez fiasco; Harold Macmillan, the best of the lot, ultimately became a parody of himself; Alec Douglas-Home was simply an interregnum; and Harold Wilson’s promise crumbled into tactical opportunism.

But Harrison’s decision to avoid a narrative of the élite is not a reflection on the qualities of Britain’s leaders. Rather, it represents the ideology of the whole enterprise. He is explicit about his stance: ‘in this book the focus will rest less upon a single political chronology than upon the far less familiar and usually distinct chronologies of non-political change.’ Politicians are put firmly in their place: ‘In no society do politicians and government administrators dominate day-to-day life … Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, and Harold Wilson must of course feature, but so must many lesser known and sometimes anonymous people.’ And should we miss the democratic nature of the enterprise, he reminds us that ‘the British people, and not the politicians, spontaneously set the pace’. He makes an even more specific argument justifying his approach. ‘This period … exempt by comparison with earlier generations, from war and poverty – frees us to focus upon what happened rather than on what the authorities intended to happen, for to a large extent the British people after 1951 made their own history, and great indeed were the changes they collectively brought about.’

Not that the élite is neglected. Harrison argues convincingly that, at the apex, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, ‘a consummate actress’ who combined personal extravagance and traditionalism with charm, a zest for life and stamina for ‘even the most tedious of public functions’, was ‘the key figure in the British monarchy’s twentieth century history’, because of her longevity, her loyal backing of her husband, George VI (‘who sorely needed it’), and her discreet support of her daughter. Again, while lineage and title were declining as distinctive upper-class qualifications, Harrison notes the landed aristocracy’s resilience in sustaining its wealth ‘[f]or if there was a long tradition in Britain of successful business moving into land, there was an equally long tradition of land successfully moving into business or itself becoming businesslike’.

The challenging task – to tell the story of a people and not just its upper echelons demands – great skills, perhaps above all in organisation. Harrison is equal to the task. The book opens with a scene-setting chapter, ‘The United Kingdom in 1951’, which introduces many of the main themes, though the refreshing originality of the work is suggested by the fact that the first substantive discussion is of the impact of the German Jewish diaspora on English intellectual life.

The main body of the work consists of seven chapters, each devoted to a major field of inquiry. Their titles are rather conventional – ‘The United Kingdom and the World’, ‘The Face of the Country’, ‘The Social Structure’, ‘Family and Welfare’, ‘Industry and Commerce’, ‘Intellect and Culture’, ‘Politics and Government’ – but there is nothing conventional about the contents. For example, ‘The United Kingdom and the World’ deals not only with the options facing Britain in this period as to whether the Commonwealth, or the special relationships with the United States, or participation in the European venture, should be the pivot of British foreign policy, but also with such topics as the space age and science fiction, the international migrations which were beginning to change the ethnic character of the British population, and the development of travel, which for many ‘meant liberation from badly cooked, badly served British food’, transforming English eating habits. The book concludes with a chapter on the 1960s which seeks to clarify that controversial decade’s role in the historical imagination, and with a ‘Retrospect’ that not only ties much together but reinforces Harrison’s sense of the seamlessness of history.

The book’s organisation is further strengthened by a number of crosscutting and recurring motifs. Perhaps the most important of these shows how this period represented the zenith of democratic corporatism, that pluralist compromise between government, business and the trade unions, with its commitment to governmental interventionism in the economy and also to the welfare state. This represented a triumph for social democracy both intellectually and in practice, despite the fact that the Tories governed for two thirds of the period.

The utility of this compromise had been proven during World War II, which brings us to another of the cross-cutting motifs: the ambiguous legacy of that war for Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Triumph in war bred national complacency about the superiority of all things British. This reinforced conservatism in all British institutions, with the monarchy secure and parliament’s prestige enhanced. This helps to explain the remarkable stability in Britain’s formal and informal political institutions in an age of dramatic economic and social change. But by inflating Britain’s self-image in international affairs, wartime victory delayed the retreat from Empire and inhibited the moves towards the European Economic Community. The war, too, made the United Kingdom the pace-setter in high farming, but by the end of the period this had turned sour, given the environmental difficulties that ensued. Hitler’s bombs encouraged massive urban renewal in the postwar period, though the forms it took too often disillusioned the community.

Two further cross-cutting motifs – one straightforward, the other paradoxical – are important. The straightforward one is the strain on values, religious in origin, in a growing material and secular culture. Homeand car-based self-sufficiency, and the growth of consumerism, fostered attitudes antipathetic to Christian values, though trends in crime revealed ‘how fragile were the social disciplines that had earlier prevailed in the face-to-face society now being slum-cleared away’. The end of the sacred Sunday, with sport and entertainment filling the Sabbath, denuded chapel and church alike.

The agenda of the corporatist state and the parties that operated it was overwhelmingly materialistic, as instanced by Macmillan’s election winning slogan in 1959, ‘You’ve never had it so good’. Christianity was not under attack; it was simply facing ‘a quietly growing indifference’. On nearly all indices – the audience for BBC religious programs, baptisms, Sunday school scholars, confirmations – the Anglican and Nonconformist churches were in absolute decline (the Roman Catholics, the Protestants of Ulster, and the smaller sectarian churchgoers provided exceptions). ‘[P]ragmatism and empiricism were ousting principle from public debate about moral issues’, experts now dominated the field, and ‘concern with the short-term subordinated longer-term (let alone other-worldly) perspectives’. Even worse, with Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God (1963), secular attitudes subverted theology.

The paradoxical cross-cutting motive reveals the extent to which time-saving technology increased rather than reduced the ‘busy-ness of life’. Despite the fact that the period saw the coming of the motorways, increases in car ownership clogged the roads during rush hour. Lots of labour-saving devices in the home made it easier for married women to work, but dual-career families, plus less clearly delimited hours of work and recreational abundance out of working hours, with all the planning that required, hardly reduced the stresses on family life. As Harrison provocatively notes, many married women at the time were simply ‘being paid for performing more anonymously tasks they would earlier have tackled unpaid and in a more personal way’.

Floodlit football grounds made it easier to televise matches and contributed to the end of amateurism in most spectator sports. Harrison memorably links the building of the football stadia in this period to secularism: ‘from glorified warehouse sheds they had by the 1960s become cantilevered constructions dwarfing mean streets, supplanting the cathedral as symbol of the city’s identity and aspirations, and their fixtures surpassed saints’ days in their national impact.’

In what is the most challenging chapter in the book, Harrison sets out to provide not a narration of the controversial 1960s but a clarification of the decade’s reputation and impact. The chapter examines in depth four images much associated with the 1960s: the revolt of the young; the decline in manners; the emergence of a novel radicalism; and the repudiation of puritanism. As a scrupulous historian, Harrison is chary of dramatic shifts in the trajectory of a people. The young have always been revolting; the old are always complaining about the decline in manners and morals; and a permissive trend has been characteristic of the whole twentieth century. He quotes the poet Philip Larkin’s ironic comment, ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963’, but tartly observes that Larkin had been into sexual intercourse outside marriage since 1945.

Nevertheless, the 1960s accelerated and publicised the permissive trend. Gambling opportunities were liberalised and legalised; censorship was dealt a mortal blow by the Lady Chatterley case; taboos on male and female masturbation, abortion, venereal disease and homosexuality ‘began to tumble like ninepins’; and there was ‘the journey of the word “fuck” towards acceptability with the media’. There was also a distinctive vogue of youth in the 1960s, a product in part of leisure and luxury becoming available to the masses. Hence: the ubiquitous jeans; long hair, earrings and necklaces adorned the male, while Old Spice fumigated him, eroding traditional attitudes towards masculinity; uniforms were out, unless worn as parody; and the Union Jack became a fashion statement.

The generation wars hotted up as reflected in the unparalleled fierceness of the radical students towards their elders, with the resulting ‘rather intense and humourless world of principled stands and non-negotiable demands’, as though a passionate sincerity could forgive even the worst behaviour.

A cultural shift, more radical than socialist, was given momentum by the Suez fiasco. As that intelligent Tory politician Iain MacLeod observed, ‘Suez, that was when we lost the intellectual vote’. Right across the cultural front there was a rejection of modernism and both highbrow and bourgeois culture, perhaps most obviously in the theatre. ‘The theatregoing middle class was pushed off the sun-drenched terrace of a big house in the south of England and into a Brechtian cavern of “kitchen sink” realism.’ This cultural shift, plus the democratisation of manners that prized informality and spontaneity over convention and ‘good form’, undermined traditional deference to the great and the good. This led to forms of television satire that exposed politicians indeed all in authority to a commentary ‘less reverential than at any time since Gillray and Rowlandson’. Many of the values of the 1960s, almost by their nature, lacked staying power, and they raised up powerful enemies. But as the cultural wars attest, they are with us still.

As the book draws to a close, shadows are darkening the future of the kingdom. The long boom is ending; Britain’s comparative economic failure is becoming starker; and the environmental degradation that accompanied prosperity is a matter of rising concern. The new Commonwealth has proved no satisfactory pivot for foreign policy; the notion of Britain playing Athens to America’s Rome was always an illusion; and now the European Economic Community is proving difficult to enter. The constraints imposed by World War II and sustained by the long boom are no longer serving to contain nationalism in the peripheries. The transformation of the ethnic composition of London and many of the great industrial centres poses threats to internal harmony – Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech was made in 1968. The nuclear family, sustained in the past by religious-based sanctions, seems under attack in all directions. Even on the sporting field, the vaunted pre-eminence of Britain in major sports is being toppled by countries either wealthier or readier politically to capitalise on sporting abilities. ‘By the 1970s,’ Harrison observes, ‘the World Cup contest had become British football’s equivalent of judgement day.’

This is magnificent if demanding history; it rests on a lifetime’s scholarship and a prodigious breadth of reference. It is all couched in an enviable prose style – accessible, aphoristic and with a subtlety to match its complex subject. The reader comes away from the text with a sense that he or she has learnt the history of a people, not just of its élite. The challenge should be for an historian to do the same for modern Australia.