Modernity Britain: Book One: Opening the Box, 1957-1959 (Modernity Britain Book 1) - Hardcover

Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face (Hilary Mantel, Observer, Summer Reads)

The most ambitious and the most diligent ... These lists are sometimes so extensive and artfully arranged that they acquire a kind of lyrical beauty in their own right ... The guiding principle of this method is not postmodern relativism but a generous and open-minded inclusiveness ... As a rule, Kynaston shows enormous self-restraint: he assembles and presents his material with such studied neutrality that it's not obvious, at first, where his own loyalties lie ... If Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem helps us to do that - if it succeeds in its objective of showing us, on a scale both panoramic and intimate, exactly what the postwar governments struggled to build, and which Thatcher, just as determinedly, sought to dismantle - then it will surely come to be seen not just as one of the present era's most important histories, but as one of the most illuminating works of literature (Jonathan Coe, Prospect)

David Kynaston's brilliant and witty chronicle of post-war Britain shows why he's The Past Master ... As wonderfully quick-witted and wide-ranging as its predecessors ... Kynaston peppers his book with these illuminating little vignettes ... I was struck by how skilfully he weaves it all together, beautifully intertwining anecdotes and observations with sparkling details and fascinating statistics ... Modernity Britain is both even-handed and exhilarating, a rare combination. Kynaston's sympathies are, broadly speaking, with the underdog, but he is wary of certainties, distrustful of the pat remedy. When he expresses overt opinions, they are always thoughtful, and arrive like thunder-flashes, illuminating the pages around them ... Was ever a history book so authoritative and, at the same time, quite so entertaining? Kynaston is particularly brilliant at filleting contemporary books, newspapers, comedy scripts, advertisement, films, political speeches, etc, for the telling quotation (Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday)

Kynaston's many fans will be pleased to hear that Modernity Britain has all the virtues of his previous volumes ... Kynaston has an unrivalled eye for long-forgotten, apparently banal and yet weirdly suggestive anecdotes ... Above all, Kynaston is a historian of tremendous compassion ... Perhaps the most moving section of Kynaston's splendid book, though, is his discussion of British schools in the late 1950s (Dominic Sandbrook, The Times)

The entertainment flies off the pages. The Kynaston method of compiling a vast array of sources and applying them with equal zest to the momentous ... and the ephemeral ... guarantees a rattling read. This is social, cultural and political history, more or less in that order, with a smile on its face ... Mostly he launches bombardments of facts, quotes, stories and numbers interspersed with pithy and shrewd editorial observations. He more than gets away with it ... There are brilliant passages throughout about the dispersion of inner-city tenant dwellers ... Kynaston specialises in fair-mindedness and nuance ... Much of the sheer and abundant joy of this book are its serendipity ... Hundreds of other wonders and absurdities captured and recreated for our enlightenment and entertainment (New Statesman)

From high-rise flats to the Carry On films, here are the never-had-it-so-good years brought vividly to life by a historian whose extraordinary appetite for research seems to know bounds (Rachel Cooke, Observer)

Kynaston is a wonderful writer and his technique of creating a collage of diary extracts, newspaper commentaries and personal reminiscences, interspersed with historical description, acts to subtly disguise the force of his own analysis (The Times Book of the Week)

The narrative is beautifully composed and Kynaston digs deeper than previous historians ... One of the great virtues of Kynaston's approach is the juxtaposition of political rhetoric and social reality (Literary Review)

Kynaston is the most readable and original social historian writing today and I've barely scratched the surface of what his latest compulsive book includes. Buy it (Daily Express)

His forte is a beguiling use of social insights, often on an intimate domestic scale, to establish a sense of period and to open windows on the recent past (Peter Clarke, Financial Times)

The late 1950s was an action-packed, often dramatic time in which the contours of modern Britain began to take shape. These were the 'never had it so good' years, when the Carry On film series and the TV soap Emergency Ward 10 got going, and films like Room at the Top and plays like A Taste of Honey brought the working class to the centre of the national frame; when the urban skyline began irresistibly to go high-rise; when CND galvanised the progressive middle class; when 'youth' emerged as a cultural force; when the Notting Hill riots made race and immigration an inescapable reality; and when 'meritocracy' became the buzz word of the day. The consequences of this 'modernity' zeitgeist, David Kynaston argues, still affect us today.