What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain

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'Exquisitely written and ripe with detail' Sunday Times. 'An engaging book... He knows his British stuff' The Times. 'One of England's most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of fiction, has done something even more original' London Review of Books. WHAT WE HAVE LOST IS A MISSILE AIMED AT THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT, A BLISTERING INDICTMENT OF POLITICIANS AND CIVIL SERVANTS, PLANNING AUTHORITIES AND FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS, WHO HAVE PRESIDED, SINCE 1945, OVER THE DECLINE OF BRITAIN'S INDUSTRIES AND REPLACED THE 'GREAT' IN BRITAIN WITH A FOR SALE SIGN HUNG AROUND THE NECK OF THE NATION. Between 1939 and 1945, Britain produced around 125,000 aircraft, and enormous numbers of ships, motor vehicles, armaments and textiles. We developed radar, antibiotics, the jet engine and the computer. Less than seventy years later, the major industries that had made Britain a global industrial power, and employed millions of people, were dead. Had they really been doomed, and if so, by what Can our politicians have been so inept Was it down to the superior competition of wily foreigners Or were our rulers culturally too hostile to science and industry James Hamilton-Paterson, in this evocation of the industrial world we have lost, analyzes the factors that turned us so quickly from a nation of active producers to one of passive consumers and financial middlemen.

Reviews

A book that is by turns engrossing and infuriating a response to Brexit in mechanical form * Evening Standard *
A book about that moment between the end of the Second World War and Suez, when there was early nuclear power, the first computers, jet engines, fast fighter planes and big ships all made here. Now Britain imports more than it exports. What went wrong * i Newspaper *
He writes beautifully * Literary Review *
Exquisitely written and ripe with detail, [James Hamilton-Paterson] explores one disaster story after another * Sunday Times *
Engaging book... He knows his British stuff' * The Times *
Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England's most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of fiction, has done something even more original. With imaginative scenes enacting 'what we have lost', he combines closely researched and detailed accounts of the decay of one legendary British product after another. Cars, motorbikes, shipbuilding and the nuclear industry are all there * London Review of Books *
Definitely a book for those questioning how Great Britain lost its greatness... Written lyrically enough to interest the general reader' * Guardian *
Chapters on cars, ships and motorbikes tell a melancholy story, though Hamilton-Paterson, also a distinguished novelist, can't resist glints of dark humour * Daily Mail *
James Hamilton-Paterson mourns our nation's industrial decline in a deeply personal polemic * International Express. *

Author Bio

James Hamilton-Paterson is one of Britain's most versatile writers. He won a Whitbread Prize for his novel Gerontius and is the author of Marked for Death, Eroica and Blackbird.