Boyd Hilton – författare

Written together with friend and journalist Boyd Hilton, Inside Little Britain follows a year in the lives of Matt Lucas and David Walliams - the good, the bad, the mundane and the monumental. A year that includes at its core a mammoth nine-month Spinal Tap-esque tour where Little Britain goes in search of Great Britain. This is a milestone book that offers an unrivalled close-up of a classic British comedy act, as it happens, at the height of its powers. But it is also a journey back into their pasts, reflecting on just how they got from there to here. It covers their childhoods, family life and early comedy performances as they found their feet; their complex friendship and working relationship; and the increasingly insane world they now inhabit.Mixing memoir and travelogue to paint an engrossing portrait of fame and comic genius, Inside Little Britain is an unmissable, candid window on life inside the celebrity bubble in all its glamour and awfulness.

This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world''s strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the ''first industrial revolution''. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victoriousfrom more than twenty years of ''war to the death'' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain''s external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country''s population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and itsmanufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England.The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefrontof European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading ''evangelicalism''. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed tothe new norms of respectability popularly known as ''Victorianism''.

This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world''s strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the ''first industrial revolution''. In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victoriousfrom more than twenty years of ''war to the death'' against Napoleonic France. But if Britain''s external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country''s population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and itsmanufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England.The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefrontof European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading ''evangelicalism''. Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed tothe new norms of respectability popularly known as ''Victorianism''.

This book examines the mentality of the upper and middle classes during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was an age obsessed by the idea of catastrophes; by wars, famines, pestilences, revolutions, floods, volcanoes, and - especially - the great commercial upheavals which periodically threatened to topple the world's first capitalist system. Thanks to the dominant evangelical ethos of the day, such sufferings seemed to be part of God's plan, and governments took a harsh attitude toward social underdogs, whether bankrupts or paupers, in order not to interfere with the dispensations of providence. Free Trade was adopted, not as the agent of growth it was later seen to be, but in order to restrain an economy which seemed to be racing out of control.In the 1850s and 1860s, however, a different attitude to social problems developed along with evolutionary approaches to the physical and animal worlds and a new understanding of God, who came to be regarded less as an Arnoldian headmaster and more like Santa Claus. At the centre of this ideology, and throwing light upon it, was a new way of understanding the Atonement.