This book germinated during a time in which, as never for centuries, British “educated opinion” had lost its confidence about the nation, its state, and its direction. The simultaneous end of empire, re-emergence of Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and loss of economic superiority to its European neighbors placed those who governed and those who formed opinion in Britain in a novel situation of uncertainty. Articles and books appeared with titles like ‘Whither Britain?” and even a special issue of the influential monthly, Encounter, entitled Suicide of a Nation?. Harold Wilson made the theme of the 1964 election campaign that ended thirteen years of Conservative rule the revival of national dynamism, the “forging of a new Britain in the white heat of the technological revolution,” although his government thereafter floundered in the unfriendly eddies of a swiftly flowing contemporary world. Six years later, Labour was turned out in a campaign in which fresh promises of national rebirth were this time chiefly employed by its opponents, led by Edward Heath. Heath's Conservative government also failed to deliver on these promises, collapsing in the midst of a world oil crisis, worsened for Britain by a miners’ strike. A decade of political promises had sorely disappointed; national “revival” turned out to be a more complex and elusive goal than a mere change of political parties. By 1974, in a climate of unparalleled gloom about public affairs, a serious rethinking of modern British history was overdue.