This is the story of modern Britain, focusing on twelve formative days in the history of the United Kingdom over the last five decades. By describing what happened on those days and the subsequent consequences, Andrew Hindmoor paints a suggestive - and to some perhaps provocative - portrait of what we have become and how we got here. Everyone will have their own list of the truly formative moments in British history over the last five decades. The twelve days selected for this book are: - The 28th of September 1976. The day Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan renounced Keynesian economics. - The 4th of May 1979. The day Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister. - The 3rd of March 1985. The day the miners' strike ended. - The 20th of September 1988. The day of Margaret Thatcher's 'Bruges speech'. - The 18th of May 1992. The day the television rights for the Premier League were sold to BskyB. - The 22nd of April 1993. The day that young black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist thugs. - The 10th April 1998. The day of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. - The 11th of September 2001. The day of the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States. - The 5th of December 2004. The day Chris Cramp and Matthew Roche became the first gay couple in the UK to become civil partners under the Civil Partnership Act. - The 13th of September 2007. The day the BBC reported that the Northern Rock bank was in trouble. - The 8th of May 2009. The day The Daily Telegraph began to publish details of MPs' expense claims. - The 1st of February 2017. The day the House of Commons voted to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.

This book is at once the history of a remarkable and fascinating phenomenon--a British-style public school rooted in Egyptian soil boasting such alumni as King Hussein of Jordan, Omar Sharif, and Edward Said--and a reflection of the spirit of Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century. Its publication in October 2002 is timed to coincide with the school's centenary. Victoria College, Alexandria, founded in October 1902, was named after the British queen Victoria, who had died the year before. It was the brainchild of a group of British businessmen who formed the nucleus of Alexandria's small British community. Deliberately fashioned as an independent, secular school, open to anyone who could afford its fees, it attracted the children both of the elite--royalty, diplomats, magnates, politicians, landowners--and of very ordinary people. Its pupils came not only from all over Egypt, but from the entire Middle East and beyond. This immensely readable history is, in the first place, a book about and for the Old Victorians. In a series of colorful sketches, backed by plentiful quotation from documents in the school archives, a series of engaging and distinguished characters come to life, not least Victoria's first two headmasters, C.R. Lias and his successor R.W.G. Reed--the two men whose enlightened vision and skillful leadership made the school what it was. Yet at the same time, this is a book whose appeal extends far beyond its immediate subject matter. In the process of putting together the story of a school, the authors have uncovered a wealth of material that will interest Middle East and postcolonial scholars as well as educationists, social historians, and students of human nature.

The principal argument in Gibraltar and Empire is that Gibraltarians constitute a separate and distinctive people, notwithstanding the political stance taken by the government of Spain. Various factors - environmental, ethnic, economic, political, religious, linguistic, educational and informal - are adduced to explain the emergence of a sense of community on the Rock and an attachment to the United Kingdom. A secondary argument is that the British empire has left its mark in Gibraltar in various forms - such as militarily - and for a number of reasons. Gilbraltar and Empire's exploration of the manifold reasons why the Gibraltarians have bucked the trend in the history of decolonization comes at a time when the issues in question have come to the fore in diplomatic and political areas.

In the climactic part of his three-book series exploring the importance of public image in the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, Kevin Sharpe employs a remarkable interdisciplinary approach that draws on literary studies and art history as well as political, cultural, and social history to show how this preoccupation with public representation met the challenge of dealing with the aftermath of Cromwell's interregnum and Charles II's restoration, and how the irrevocably changed cultural landscape was navigated by the sometimes astute yet equally fallible Stuart monarchs and their successors.