The Essential A-Z Guide

Modern British History

An invaluable and opinionated guide to modern Britain, designed to inform both the general reader and the student about our culture and society, politics and economics.

200 snappy and stylish essays on the topics that dominated British life since 1900

It is enormous fun... This is a "reference book with attitude"... [And] how can you not admire a book which, in a passing mention of Coco Chanel, describes her as "the Nazi-sympathising French couturier"?

Mark Garnett is the co-author of Whatever Happened to the Tories (1997), Keith Joseph: A Life (2001), and Splendid! Splendid! The Authorized Biography of Willie Whitelaw (2002). 
 
Richard Weight is a cultural and social historian, currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Boston. A regular broadcaster and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of the Arts, he is the author of Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 (2002).

Modern British History is a comprehensive, entertaining survey of the events, people and themes that make us who we are, written by two of the country's leading scholars of the subject. In 200 concise essays, covering topics as diverse as pornography and the poll tax, the Blitz and New Labour, the authors explore the interwoven culture, society, politics and economics of the recent past. 
 
Bombarded by information as never before, we all need to appreciate the extent to which seemingly disparate events connect with other. This Essential A - Z guide offers a consistent line of argument with a refreshing disrespect for old orthodoxy. Read separately, its entries are a mine of useful information; taken together, they build a vivid, compelling and controversial picture of Britain at the start of the twenty-first century.

Richard Weight

This [is a] highly entertaining and discursive mixture of social history and cultural theory… As an analysis of Britain’s youth tribes of the past 50 years…Mod: A Very British Style is definitive

Richard Weight’s splendid new book… The writing is witty…the judgments are pinpoint accurate… The research is formidable in its scope and detail

MOD is an important book because it shows how a style so often dismissed as trivial is in fact an important determinant of Britishness... This is a great book because it has the courage to celebrate what is wonderfully modern

Well-written throughout, crackles with reflection on fashion, music and film

A serious and worthwhile insight into a fascinating aspect of youth identity

The book to get Sir Bradley Wiggins for his birthday

For anyone who wants an accessible, thorough and discursive audit of youth culture over the past 50 years, MOD will be immensely satisfying

We can’t seem to get enough of the mod look. Now you can swot up on the originals with Mod: a Very British Style

It’s an ode to youth culture and the Britain it created

He has done his job well. As we age, we need to be reminded that our youth was special and that nostalgia was good for the soul

MOD is a weighty book. Its scope is almost as impressive as its Conran-esque endpapers…

The perfect gift for someone who wants to walk down memory lane. The '60s, '70s and '80s are investigated thoroughly, with clubs, fashion, music and geography carefully described

It’s the history of an attitude, and [Weight’s] captured it very well

An impeccably written, thoughtful, provocative, at time shocking, yet most compelling book describing the uprising of modernism in Britain, from the 1940s onwards

From Bebop to Britpop, Britain’s Biggest Youth Movement

Welcome to the world of the sharp-suited ‘faces’. The Italianistas. The scooter-riding, all-night-dancing instigators of what became, from its myriad sources, a very British phenomenon. 
 
Mod began life as the quintessential working-class movement of a newly affluent nation – a uniquely British amalgam of American music and European fashions that mixed modern jazz with modernist design in an attempt to escape the drab conformity, snobbery and prudery of life in 1950s Britain. But what started as a popular cult became a mainstream culture, and a style became a revolution. 
 
In Mod, Richard Weight tells the story of Britain’s biggest and most influential youth cult. He charts the origins of Mod in the Soho jazz scene of the 1950s, set to the cool sounds of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He explores Mod’s heyday in Swinging London in the mid-60s – to a new soundtrack courtesy of the Small Faces, the Who and the Kinks. He takes us to the Mod–Rocker riots at Margate and Brighton, and into the world of fashion and design dominated by Twiggy, Mary Quant and Terence Conran. 
 
But Mod did not end in the 1960s. Richard Weight not only brings us up to the cult’s revival in the late 70s – played out against its own soundtrack of Quadrophenia and the Jam – but reveals Mod to be the DNA of British youth culture, leaving its mark on glam and Northern Soul, punk and Two Tone, Britpop and rave. 
 
This is the story of Britain’s biggest and brassiest youth movement – and of its legacy. Music, film, fashion, art, architecture and design – nothing was untouched by the eclectic, frenetic, irresistible energy of Mod.

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Richard Weight

Praise for MOD

This [is a] highly entertaining and discursive mixture of social history and cultural theory… As an analysis of Britain’s youth tribes of the past 50 years…Mod: A Very British Style is definitive

Richard Weight’s splendid new book… The writing is witty…the judgments are pinpoint accurate… The research is formidable in its scope and detail

MOD is an important book because it shows how a style so often dismissed as trivial is in fact an important determinant of Britishness... This is a great book because it has the courage to cele ...

This [is a] highly entertaining and discursive mixture of social history and cultural theory… As an analysis of Britain’s youth tribes of the past 50 years…Mod: A Very British Style is definitive

Richard Weight’s splendid new book… The writing is witty…the judgments are pinpoint accurate… The research is formidable in its scope and detail

MOD is an important book because it shows how a style so often dismissed as trivial is in fact an important determinant of Britishness... This is a great book because it has the courage to cele ...

This [is a] highly entertaining and discursive mixture of social history and cultural theory… As an analysis of Britain’s youth tribes of the past 50 years…Mod: A Very British Style is definitive

Richard Weight’s splendid new book… The writing is witty…the judgments are pinpoint accurate… The research is formidable in its scope and detail

MOD is an important book because it shows how a style so often dismissed as trivial is in fact an important determinant of Britishness... This is a great book because it has the courage to cele ...

Books by Richard Weight

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