Britain

On the centenary of Britain’s first Labour government, three recent histories cast a sympathetic eye over Ramsay MacDonald’s nine months in Number 10.

The British Council was founded to help the world better understand Britain and to fight fascism. As times changed, so did its remit.

One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink by Matthew Parker and Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain by Charlotte Lydia Riley are filled with ambition.

Soldiers on the front line in France and Flanders saw their fight as the only legitimate one. But in Britain, the mobilisation of the domestic workforce was integral to winning the First World War.

Concern for animal welfare can be precarious, as the history of Britain’s pit ponies shows.

Members of the House of Lords are traditionally prohibited from giving up their seats. What if a move to the Commons becomes a political necessity?

Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jessica Cox looks at the engine of the Victorian population boom: motherhood.

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 by Robert Gildea is shaped more by heartbreak than heroism.

A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65 by David Kynaston is a hyperreal account of Britain on the cusp of modernity.

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Enquiry and Hope is a Whiggish history of humanism from the Renaissance to the present.