num_pages: 752
description: "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 also into the secret Cabinet rooms in which decisions about the British nuclear bomb were taken and plans made for the catastrophe of nuclear war. He brings to life the ageing Churchill, in his last faltering spell as Prime Minister, the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking his country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion, and the rise of 'Supermac' Harold Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance. Above all, "Having It So Good" captures the smell and the flavour of an extraordinary decade in which affluence and anxiety combined to produce their own winds of change.
language: English
title: Having It So Good: Britain In The Fifties
titlecomplete: Having It So Good: Britain In The Fifties
characters: Clement Attlee, Rab Butler, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury, Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Macmillan
genres: Nonfiction, History, British Literature, Politics
ratings_count: 80
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Orwell Prize, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction
publisher: Allen Lane