The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War

An exceptionally fine study, tracing the course of British wartime politics. Addison, a young English historian, reconstructs and interprets the five-year wartime coalition, which, he suggests, prepared a new, optimistic Labour consensus under Attlee to replace the old, constricted Baldwin consensus of the prewar era. In a sense Attlee received "a double mandate: one from the electorate, and one from within the Establishment." An imaginative, suggestive, and highly readable book.