Richard Vinen – författare

'If you had assumed you knew everything about these two men of destiny, Richard Vinen’s shrewd, provocative book will make you think again' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, THE TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2025'Offers shrewd and sometimes original insights on both men' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES‘A deeply researched, extremely well-written, and intellectually stimulating book’ ANDREW ROBERTS, CLAREMONT REVIEWA compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle shows, that is only a part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won.There was a paradox in the parallel and intertwined lives of these extraordinary men. De Gaulle – tall, gauche and incorruptible – exhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchill – short, charming, witty and a bon vivant – resembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each other’s stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was ‘the great artist of a great history’, while Churchill recognised de Gaulle as ‘l’homme du destin’.Wolfson Prize-winning historian Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, the book makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. Vinen retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires.Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen afresh and we gain new insights into their achievements and their legacy today.

In the summer of 1940 the French army was one of the largest and best in the world, confident of victory. In the space of a few nightmarish weeks that all changed as the French and their British allies were crushed and eight million people fled their homes. Richard Vinen's new book describes the consequences of that defeat. It does so not by looking at political leaders in Vichy or Paris or London but rather at those who were caught up in daily horrors of war. It describes the fate of a French prisoner of war who was punished because he wrote a love letter to a German woman, and the fate of a French woman who gave birth to a German-fathered child as the Americans landed in Normandy. It describes the 'false policemen' who proliferated in occupied Paris as desperate men on the run seeking to feed themselves by blackmailing those who were even more vulnerable than themselves. It asks why some gentile French people chose to risk imprisonment by wearing yellow stars. It recounts the fate of a couple of estranged middle-aged Jews, separated by the mobilisation of 1939, who found themselves (in July 1942) on the same train to Auschwitz. Extremely moving and brilliantly readable, The Unfree French is a remarkable addition to the literature of the Second World War.

Winner of the Templer Medal and the Wolfson History PrizeSunday Times Top 10 BestsellerRichard Vinen's National Service is a serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of that extraordinary institution, which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself. With great sympathy and curiosity, Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with National Service. This book is fascinating to those who endured or even enjoyed their time in uniform, but also to anyone wishing to understand the unique nature of post-war Britain.

'Fresh, compelling ... an important book, revealing that 50 years on, 1968 is still unfinished business' Andrew Hussey, Financial Times'A thoughtful, readable account of a moment in history that deserves to be dwelt on' Andrew Marr, The Times1968 saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around ten million French workers went on strike and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer-term implications; terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important roots to 1968. Bill Clinton and even Tony Blair are, in many ways, the product of that year.The Long '68 is a striking and original attempt half a century on to show how these events - from anti-war marches in the United States to revolts against Soviet oppression in eastern Europe - which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies that are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time. The book pursues the story into the 1970s to show both the ever more violent forms of radicalization that stemmed from 1968, and the brutal reactions from those in power that brought the era to an end.

The 'long 68' saw an extraordinary range of protests across much of the western world. Some of these were genuinely revolutionary - around 10 million French workers struck and the whole state teetered on the brink of collapse. Others were more easily contained, but had profound longer term implications - terrorist groups, feminist collectives, gay rights activists could all trace important roots to 1968. Bill Clinton and even Tony Blair are, in many ways, the product of 68.THE LONG '68 is a striking and original attempt, half a century on, to show how these events, which in some ways still seem so current, stemmed from histories and societies which are in practice now extraordinarily remote from our own time.

A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022'There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's' Jonathan Coe, Financial Times'Vinen has written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it' Daily TelegraphFor over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century: a place of mass production and full employment that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic halt in the 1980s. Birmingham has also been a magnet for migration, drawing in people from Wales, Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Indeed, much of British history can be explained, in large measure, with reference to Birmingham.Vinen roots his sweeping story in the experience of individuals. This is a book about figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran Duran, and also about those that everyone ought to have heard of. It captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories in the 1930s to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub in the 1980s - were caught up in the convulsions of social change.Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain does not make sense without it.

A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022'There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's' Jonathan Coe, Financial Times'Vinen has written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it' Daily TelegraphFor over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century: a place of mass production and full employment that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic halt in the 1980s. Birmingham has also been a magnet for migration, drawing in people from Wales, Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Indeed, much of British history can be explained, in large measure, with reference to Birmingham.Vinen roots his sweeping story in the experience of individuals. This is a book about figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran Duran, and also about those that everyone ought to have heard of. It captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories in the 1930s to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub in the 1980s - were caught up in the convulsions of social change.Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain does not make sense without it.

The problem with the history of twentieth-century Europe is that everyone thinks they know it. The great stories of the century - the two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazism and communism, female emancipation - seem self-evidently important. But behind the grand narratives, the politics and the ideologies, lies another history: the history of forces that shaped the lives of individual Europeans.That is the thrust of Richard Vinen's magisterial survey of this uniquely destructive and creative century. It argues that there is no single history that encompasses the experience of all Europeans, but rather a multiplicity of different, partially interlocking, histories. Some of these histories are told here in a book which seeks to root the generalisations of large-scale analysis in the concrete - and sometimes incongruous - details of individual lives. Challenging, informing and revealing, this is history writing at its finest.

This 1995 book is a general study of politics and society in the Fourth Republic and is founded on extensive primary research. It approaches the period in terms of successful conservatism rather than thwarted reform, maintaining that conservatism in France was a more subtle, dynamic force than has previously been appreciated. Not the preserve of any one single party, conservative ideas were often defended by institutions outside the realm of explicit politics altogether, such as business associations, civil service departments and the law courts. It is proposed that conservatives did not simply return to French politics in 1945 untouched by the events of the previous five years. The experiences of Vichy, the occupation and the purges produced new kinds of political synthesis, making conservatives more dynamic and receptive to change than their 'progressive' opponents.

It has long been assumed that large-scale industry was one of the pillars of support for the Vichy regime which ruled France - under the German aegis - from 1940 to 1944. In particular it has been assumed that business used Vichy to reverse the advantages that labour had secured after the election of the Popular Front government in 1936. Richard Vinen argues that this assumption is false. He suggests that large-scale industry, mostly based in northern France, was geographically and psychologically isolated from the preoccupations of a government which was based in the south. Furthermore, business soon became aware of the probability of an allied victory and was consequently eager to distance itself from a government that it saw as doomed. Most important of all, the Popular Front legislation of 1936 had already been undermined by the rearmament programme that preceded the fall of France in 1940.

This 1995 book is a general study of politics and society in the Fourth Republic and is founded on extensive primary research. It approaches the period in terms of successful conservatism rather than thwarted reform, maintaining that conservatism in France was a more subtle, dynamic force than has previously been appreciated. Not the preserve of any one single party, conservative ideas were often defended by institutions outside the realm of explicit politics altogether, such as business associations, civil service departments and the law courts. It is proposed that conservatives did not simply return to French politics in 1945 untouched by the events of the previous five years. The experiences of Vichy, the occupation and the purges produced new kinds of political synthesis, making conservatives more dynamic and receptive to change than their 'progressive' opponents.

This book describes the history of France between the anti-parliamentary riots of 1934 and the death of de Gaulle in 1970. It is written as a series of interpretative essays rather than a straight chronological account. Special emphasis is laid on the broad social conflicts - between classes, sexes and generations - that underlay the complicated party politics of France. Attention is also given to the episodes - the rule of the Vichy government, the Algerian war, the ''thirty glorious years of economic growth'', and the student riots of 1968 - that helped to transform the nation of Clochemerle into that of Concorde.

Britain''s first female prime minister remains a political figure of almost mythical proportions. Margaret Thatcher divided a political nation, became a cultural icon, and was the longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century. Her period in government coincided with extraordinary changes in British society and in Britain''s place in the world. Thatcher''s Britaintells the story of Thatcherism for a generation with no personal memories of the 80s, as well as for those who want to revisit the polemics of their youth. It seeks to rescue Thatcher from being seen as John the Baptist for Tony Blair, stresses that Thatcherism was not a timeless phenomenon, but rooted in the 70s and 80s, and focuses our attention away from her legend, to what her government actually did during this tumultuous period in British history.

'If you had assumed you knew everything about these two men of destiny, Richard Vinen’s shrewd, provocative book will make you think again' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, THE TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2025'Offers shrewd and sometimes original insights on both men' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES‘A deeply researched, extremely well-written, and intellectually stimulating book’ ANDREW ROBERTS, CLAREMONT REVIEWA compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle shows, that is only a part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won.There was a paradox in the parallel and intertwined lives of these extraordinary men. De Gaulle – tall, gauche and incorruptible – exhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchill – short, charming, witty and a bon vivant – resembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each other’s stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was ‘the great artist of a great history’, while Churchill recognised de Gaulle as ‘l’homme du destin’.Wolfson Prize-winning historian Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, the book makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. Vinen retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires.Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen afresh and we gain new insights into their achievements and their legacy today.

'If you had assumed you knew everything about these two men of destiny, Richard Vinen's shrewd, provocative book will make you think again' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, THE TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2025'Offers shrewd and sometimes original insights on both men' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES'Deeply researched yet highly readable, with fresh and often provocative insights' DAVID REYNOLDSA compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle shows, that is only a part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won.There was a paradox in the parallel and intertwined lives of these extraordinary men. De Gaulle tall, gauche and incorruptible exhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchill short, charming, witty and a bon vivant resembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each other's stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was 'the great artist of a great history', while Churchill recognised de Gaulle as 'l'homme du destin'.Wolfson Prize-winning historian Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, the book makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. Vinen retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires.Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen afresh and we gain new insights into their achievements and their legacy today.

'If you had assumed you knew everything about these two men of destiny, Richard Vinen's shrewd, provocative book will make you think again' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, THE TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2025'Offers shrewd and sometimes original insights on both men' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES'Deeply researched yet highly readable, with fresh and often provocative insights' DAVID REYNOLDSA compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle shows, that is only a part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won.There was a paradox in the parallel and intertwined lives of these extraordinary men. De Gaulle tall, gauche and incorruptible exhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchill short, charming, witty and a bon vivant resembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each other's stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was 'the great artist of a great history', while Churchill recognised de Gaulle as 'l'homme du destin'.Wolfson Prize-winning historian Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, the book makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. Vinen retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires.Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen afresh and we gain new insights into their achievements and their legacy today.

A compelling joint biography of Churchill and de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the 20th century.Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were thrown together by the challenges of war. They incarnated the resistance of Britain and France to the existential threat from Nazi Germany, and their ultimate victory over Hitler has ensured their achievements will never be forgotten. But, as The Last Titans shows, that is only a small part of a complex story. Both men influenced their countries, and the world around them, long after the war was won. De Gaulletall, gauche, charmless, and incorruptibleexhibited qualities often associated with the English. Churchillshort, charming, a bon vivant, and fond of moneyresembled the quintessential politician of the French Third Republic. Their working relationship was rarely smooth, but they appreciated each others stature: de Gaulle said Churchill was the great artist of a great history, while Churchill recognized de Gaulle as l'homme du destin. Richard Vinen explores what made these men exceptional and how profoundly they were influenced by their national cultures. Beyond personal intrigue, the book makes a wider point that Britain and France are both haunted by perceptions of past greatness. Vinen retraces the paths of two leaders who once helmed superpowers but lived to see their nations weakened by two world wars and the loss of empires. Written with extraordinary narrative verve, The Last Titans offers a fresh exploration into the lives of de Gaulle and Churchill. By bringing their two stories into one, each man is seen afresh and we gain new insights into their achievements and their legacy today.

SUNDAY TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR and FINANCIAL TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014WINNER OF THE TEMPLER MEDAL AND THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE Sunday Times Top 10 BestsellerRichard Vinen's new book is a serious - if often very entertaining - attempt to get to grips with the reality of National Service, an extraordinary institution which now seems as remote as the British Empire itself. With great sympathy and curiosity, Vinen unpicks the myths of the two 'gap years', which all British men who came of age between 1945 and the early 1960s had to fill with National Service. Millions of teenagers were thrown together and under often brutal conditions taught to obey orders and to fight. The luck of the draw might result in two years of boredom in some dilapidated British barracks, but it could also mean being thrown into a dangerous combat mission in a remote part of the world.By any measure National Service had a huge impact on the nature of British society, and yet it has been remarkably little written about. As the military's needs wound down and Britain ceased to be a great power, National Service came to be seen as just an embarrassment, and its culture of rank and discipline something which many British people were by the 1960s running away from. But without a proper understanding of National Service the story of post-war Britain barely makes sense. Richard Vinen provides that missing book. It will be fascinating to those who endured or even enjoyed their time in uniform, but also to anyone wishing to understand the unique nature of post-war Britain.