Michael Wood

I’ve been enjoying Susan Oosthuizen’s thought-provoking The Emergence of the English (Arc Humanities Press). It deftly synthesizes the growing consensus of historians and archaeologists as to the origins of the English in the slow transformation of late Romano-British communities in post-imperial eastern Britain. An accessible contribution to the growing debate about what should, or should not, be called ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

In The Windrush Betrayal (Guardian Faber), journalist Amelia Gentleman tells the appalling stories of the ‘Windrush generation’, who came to Britain from the Caribbean in and after 1948. More than 60 years later, they found themselves targeted as illegal migrants, threatened, detained, and in some cases “repatriated” to countries they had no memory of after a lifetime spent in the UK. It may seem jaw-dropping, but with Brexit looming, Gentleman fears there are more ‘hostile environment’ moments to come.

Lastly, Winds of Change (Allen Lane), the third in Peter Hennessy’s marvellous trilogy, gives us a portrait of a nation still coming to terms with its costly victory in 1945 and the subsequent loss of its empire. Like the previous volumes, it’s a terrific mix of social history and cabinet-room politics. I’d love to see Peter bring the tale right up to Brexit, which I suspect he would see as drawing a line under Britain’s story as a great power. Unputdownable.

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester