John Beckett was a rising political star. Elected as Labour's youngest M.P. in 1924, he was constantly in the news and tipped for greatness. But ten years later he was propaganda chief for Mosley's fascists, and one of Britain's three best known anti-Semites. Yet his mother, whom he loved, was a Jew. Her ancestors were Solomons, Isaacs and Jacobsons, originally from Prussia. He successfully hid his Jewish ancestry all his life - he said his mother's family were "fisher folk from the east coast." His son, the author of this book, acclaimed political biographer and journalist Francis Beckett, did not discover the truth until John Beckett had been dead for years. He left Mosley and founded the National Socialist League with William Joyce, later Lord Haw Haw, and spent the war years in prison, considered a danger to the war effort. For the rest of his life, and all of Francis Beckett's childhood, John Beckett and his family were closely watched by the security services. Their devious machinations, traced in records only recently released, damaged chiefly his young family. This is a fascinating and brutally honest account of a troubled man in turbulent times.

In 1956, everything changed. Britain and France occupied Suez, and the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. Nikita Khrushchev's 'secret speech' exposed the crimes of Stalin. Suddenly the left found itself homeless, as the Communist Party became uninhabitable. The Royal Court Theatre unveiled John Osborne's Look Back in Anger , exploding the upper-middle-class complacency in which British theatre had cloaked itself. Tommy Steele and Lonnie Donegan leapt to fame, rock 'n' roll music replacing the gentle pop songs Mum and Dad also liked. Jim Laker made history by taking nineteen Australian wickets at Old Trafford, and Britain deported Archbishop Makarios from Cyprus and suppressed the Mau Mau in Kenya. It was the first full year of independent television, and the year the Treaty of Rome was negotiated. All the comfortable post-war assumptions were shattered. In the immediate post-war years, many people thought that, having conquered the Nazis, there was little else left to conquer. In 1956, they learned that they were wrong. 1956 was the end of the Second World War and the start of the '60s. It was the year Attlee's Britain started to crumble and Thatcher's Britain stirred in the womb. This extraordinary book takes us through this most momentous of years, week by week and sometimes hour by hour.

A controversial new investigation in the 1984 Miners strike and how it changed Modern Britain. The Miners' strike was a dividing line in Modern British history. Before 1984, Britain was an industrial nation, reborn from the ashes of the Second World War by Clement Atlee's vision of a welfare state. Most of the great industries were nationalised and the trade unions was one of the major forces in the land. After the strike, which ended with humiliating defeat in March 1985, Thatcher's Britain was born. In March 1984, the leader of the Miners' Union, Arthur Scargill, led his members out of the pits without a ballot to protest at planned pit closures; they would spend the next 13 months facing the utmost deprivations as they fought to keep their jobs. On picket lines the miners faced harassment and the police, which culminated in the violent Battle of Orgreave. Meanwhile Thatcher's government feared that Britain was on the verge of a civil war. It was a struggle of attrition that neither side could dare lose. Twenty five years after the strike, the debate is still controversial. Marching to the Faultline tells the full story of the strike from confidential cabinet meetings at Downing Street to backroom negotiations, and life on the picket line. The book draws on previously unseen sources from interviews with the major figures, private archives and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to set the record straight.