In 1900 Britain was arguably the greatest power in the world - something that nobody seriously holds today. Instead, the titles of numerous books proclaim our obsession with the issue of national decline. The history of twentieth-century Britain sometimes threatens to become little else, focused on the question: where did it all go wrong?

Peter Clarke challenges this vision. Everyone can see that some relative decline in Britain's position during the century was inevitable. But a simple focus on decline implies a sort of history in which international rivalry, whether of a military, political or economic kind, is taken as the only story worth telling. He tells other stories too.

Hope and Glory explains the political changes that transformed Britain. It gives a clear account of the course of party politics, with vivid portraits of such leaders as Joseph Chamberlain, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and Margaret Thatcher. It shows too how the outlook of ordinary people made a difference as, with the coming of an equal suffrage for men and women, democratic elections made and unmade Governments.

But Hope and Glory is not just a political history. It also makes sense of fundamental social and economic changes, which have shaped the modern family and gender roles within it, and it looks at jobs and prices, food and shelter, education and welfare. If culture for some people meant the Vorticists and Virginia Woolf, for others it meant football and films - all now recognized as part of the history of twentieth-century Britain as experienced by the three entire generations who lived through it.