A People's History of England [antikvár]

FOREWORD o. 'ne of the problems of writing history is to know where to stop, since history goes on continuously while a book has got to end somewhere. When I was writing this book twenty-seven years ago I solved the problem by stopping at the point we had then actually reached-with civil war still raging in Spain and the world under the menace of Fascism and of a new war even more terrible than that of 1914. This does not seem a suitable or even a possible stopping point in 1964. And in any case the events between 1918 and 1937 were necessarily only summarised in a brief Epilogue which has now become quite Inadequate as an account of those momentous years. Two possible courses seemed open to me. One was to bring my story up to date, or at least to find a new and more satisfactory stopping point somewhere between 1937 and the present time. The advantages of this are obvious. The disadvantages are that to deal with this period at all adequately it would have to be treated in considerable detail, which would destroy the present balance of the book and add very considerably to its already formidable length. In any case I do not feel myself competent to deal with the very difficult problems of a period quite outside my own field of study and for which a really gigantic bulk of material would have to be mastered. A good popular history of Britain in the Twentieth Century is certainly needed, but I am not the person to write it. The other course, which I have adopted, was to cut