Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State

The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State

Timmins, Nicholas

Paperback

Series: Biography of the Welfare State

General Political ScienceGeneral SociologySocial Movements

ISBN10: 000710264X
ISBN13: 9780007102648
Publisher: Harpercollins
Published: Jul 16 2001
Pages: 738
Weight: 1.43
Height: 1.83 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

An accessible and entertaining narrative history of the establishment, development and unravelling of the British Welfare State - now fully revised to cover Blair's first term. Lively writing in the style of Peter Hennessy.

'Giant Want. Giant Disease. Giant Ignorance. Giant Squalor. And the insidious Giant Idleness, which destroys wealth and corrupts men. These were evils to be vanquished by the postwar reconstruction of Britain. Timmins' book recaptures brilliantly the high hopes of the period in which the Welfare State began to be created, and conveys the cranky zeal of its inventor, William Beveridge. The onslaught on the five Giants was the work of five gargantuan programmes that made up the core of Beveridge's Welfare State. These were social security, health, education, housing and a policy of full employment. It is notoriously difficult to write about such subjects and keep the reader reading, but Timmins performs wonders of narrative clarity, anecdote and human detail in a book that finds its chosen level somewhere between Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' and '1066 and All That'...There is something very moving about his rhetoric of transformation and 'The Five Giants' will stir up strong emotions. It is impossible not to respond in personal terms to a book that is a part of so many of our histories, woven into the day-to-day texture of our lives.' Fiona MacCarthy, Observer

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