12 Days That Made Modern Britain
ANDREW HINDMOOR
(Oxford University Press, 352 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Asked what blows governments off course, Harold Macmillan quipped “Events, dear boy, events”. The conceit of Andrew Hindmoor’s new book is that history can be told by taking a magnifying glass to such events. Starting in 1976 with Jim Callaghan announcing the end of the post-war economic consensus, and ending in 2017 with the invocation of Article 50, 12 Days That Made Modern Britain takes us on a pointillist tour d’horizon of the past 40-odd years.

Breezy yet fact-filled, the book is a masterpiece of compression. One might cavil that the closest Hindmoor gets to cultural matters is a discussion of the selling of the TV rights for the newly established Premier League. Doesn’t, say, the fallout from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses rate a mention?