"Back in 1953 when the Queen ascended the throne, Britain was a very different nation. People wore more hats and uniforms, went regularly to church and were more deeply class-conscious. The Windrush generation had arrived just five years earlier, and many Africa-Caribbean and Indian people new to the UK were being denied housing, work, and entry to pubs, clubs and places of worship. There was division over immigration, food rationing and debate about what a late twentieth-century Britain should look like. How did we get from there to here? In this vital, brilliantly entertaining history, Andrew Marr offers an answer through stories from a diverse cast of individual lives. Every person in this book demanded or drove change in modern Britain, leading the charge across politics, social inequality, culture, music, sexuality, gender and freedom of expression. And by doing so has contributed something to the complexities of Britain's national identity. Class, conformity, religion, immigration and culture and fairness are conversations Britain has grappled with over the past seven decades, led most often not by our politicians but by our activists and community leaders. Our artists, sports heroes, factory workers, trade unionists, musicians and tech innovators. Charting people from all corners of the country and those who emigrated from it, this is a history of Britain's real movers and shakers from Sylvia Plath to Elvis Costello, Frank Crichlow to Bob Geldof, Roy Jenkins to Marcus Rashford, Zaha Hadid to James Dyson, Mary Whitehouse to Elizabeth David, Dusty Springfield to David Attenborough. Through these sung and unsung players of the modern Elizabethan era, and many more, this is a history of our attitudes that gets to the heart of how 1950s Britain evolved into the diverse, contradictory and divided country we live in today."-- Taken from book-cover.