1956

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.