This book is exactly what its title advertises, a political history, although it is disproportionately English history, not British. The histories of Scotland and Wales hardly feature, and Northern Ireland appears mainly as a problem. As a detailed narrative of twentieth-century British politics, it is useful, although it is stronger on the first half of the century than the second. Rubinstein devotes 251 pages to the period 1900–1951 but just 96 pages to the period 1951–2000. The period from Thatcher's election in 1979 to the end of the century races by in just 29 pages. Consequently the narrative of the first half of the century is much more satisfactory than the narrative of the second half because it is fuller and more complex.

Twentieth-Century Britain is traditional history. It has some discussion of economic developments in the last one hundred years, but little about culture, gender, or race. Rubinstein also pays little attention to Britain's imperial connections, although it can be argued that much of British politics in the twentieth century, like much of British life, can only be fully understood in an imperial context. Instead, what Rubinstein mainly offers is clear and detailed political history, seen entirely from the center. The book starts with the election of the Unionists in 1900 and continues straightforwardly until the first years of the Blair administration.

Much of Rubinstein's narrative is up to date and uncontroversial, but like all historians, he has his biases and his own take on events. Sometimes these are presented in the midst of a discussion that indicates historical debate. For example, he concludes “there is really no reason to suppose that the British Liberal party could not have continued indefinitely as the normal party of the Left” (65), but readers will be able to gather that other historians, albeit unnamed, might disagree with this conclusion because Rubinstein has already warned them that “the ultimate health of the Liberal government and the Liberal party at this time has been among the most hotly debated of all topics of modern British political history” (63). But in other places the uninformed reader will not be able to tell that Rubinstein's judgments are open to question. For example, Rubinstein concludes that Lloyd George “may be seen as opening the floodgates to the equally extremist rhetoric of the militant Ulster Protestants” (36). But others might point out that there was a long history of Ulster Protestant extremism and that neither the Protestants nor their Tory supporters needed Lloyd George to provide a model. Similarly, Rubinstein writes that Anthony Eden “killed a proposal to limit New Commonwealth immigration, thus helping to create a race problem in Britain where none existed before” (260). But as Laura Tabili, Kathleen Paul, and others have shown, Britain's “race problem” had a long history. Nor would all historians agree with Rubinstein that “Eden was absolutely right to try to regain the Suez Canal” (262). Or take one last example. “‘Thatcherism,’” Rubinstein writes, “may thus be fairly said to have gone a considerable way to restoring Britain to economic health and to bringing about a kind of cultural revolution” (333). This conclusion indicates at least as much about Rubinstein's own views as it does about the Thatcher administration. Compare, in contrast, Peter Clarke's conclusion about Thatcher in his history of the twentieth century: “It is easier to show that Thatcherism had notable successes in modifying the immediate behavior of the British people at a particular stage in the economic cycle, than to point to a fundamental transformation of attitudes. … Thatcher achieved her victories at a terrible cost, usually borne by others” (Hope and Glory, 2nd ed. [London, 2004], 388, 400).

Twentieth-Century Britain will certainly appeal to some specialists and students as a solid narrative of the twentieth century, particularly before the Second World War, with good statistics about electoral outcomes and useful information about the class background of different Cabinets. But my sense is that, at least in the United States, anyone who teaches a course on twentieth-century Britain will still prefer to use Clarke's broader and more accessible Hope and Glory. More important, Twentieth-Century Britain lacks any reference matter. There are no footnotes, no bibliography, and only occasional references in the text to other historians. Here and there Rubinstein refers to debates among historians, but he rarely identifies or summarizes opposing schools of thought. Sometimes, he simply ignores ongoing historical debates. In consequence, advanced students and specialists will find the book has limited value as an introduction to the historiography of the period. Equally troubling, Rubinstein eschews any larger interpretation of twentieth-century history. The book lacks either an introduction or a conclusion that might have set out larger themes or attempted to spell out the key disjunctures and unities of the century, the successes and failures. Most of the chapters devoted to a particular period share the same limitation. The final sentence of the book gives a sense of this shortcoming: “Sooner or later ‘the people’ (another ‘New Labour’ catchphrase) would eventually tire of Tony Blair, just as it had once tired of Balfour and Asquith, MacDonald and Baldwin, Eden and Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher.” So much for the twentieth century! Ultimately, I found this book unsatisfactory because it does not fully synthesize the huge literature about twentieth century British politics or present new ways of thinking about the period as a whole or even about different eras.