Political historian Peter Hennessy reads from his new study of Britain in the early 1960s.

The politics of the early 1960s were dominated by the premiership of Harold Macmillan. But when the ageing and infirm Prime Minister decided to resign, his replacement as leader of the Conservative administration was a lofty-voiced peer, Lord Home, who had been Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary. Obliged to give up his peerage, the former Fourteenth Earl, now plain Alec Douglas-Home, was PM for under a year - when he was defeated in October 1964 by his pipe-smoking nemesis, the Yorkshire-vowelled Labour leader, Harold Wilson, in one of the closest-fought British general elections of all time.

Written and Read by Peter Hennessy
Adapted for radio by Libby Spurrier
Produced by Simon Elmes

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