Between the disintegration of the Liberal Party in 1915 and the election of Harold Wilson's Labour in 1964, Britain weathered a turbulent half-century including two world wars and many profound socio-political changes. What did not survive this tumult was Britain's sea-based Empire, as the great land-based USA and USSR now assumed dominance. With customary wit, scholarship and wisdom Robert Blake guides the reader through Britain's slow decline from the world's premier power to a nation with no military commitments East of Suez: still important, wishing to see itself as 'a cut above the rest', but now effectively no better than third-ranking.
'[T]he most successful sections [are] the four brilliant chapters on the Second World War... But it is not only for these that The Decline of Power should be read. It is a fair-minded book... fluently, even racily written...' Peter Pulzer, London Review of Books
- ISBN10 0195204808
- ISBN13 9780195204803
- Publish Date 29 August 1985
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 May 2016
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press, USA
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 462
- Language English