New and selected writings by one of the United Kingdom’s leading contemporary historians.

As one of Britain’s foremost constitutional experts and contemporary historians, Peter Hennessy has spent his professional life unpicking the arcane world of Whitehall and Westminster. He began his career as a journalist for the Times, the Economist, and the Financial Times, developing a network of insider contacts who helped him shine a light on some of the dustiest corners of the British establishment. As a journalist, prize-winning contemporary historian, and political commentator, he has chronicled the workings of the British state with wit, affection, and a healthy sense of the absurd over a five-decade career. Now a crossbench peer, he has, in his own words, “moved in with his exhibits.” Hennessy is also a stalwart of BBC election night coverage and a regular commentator on BBC Radio 4, bringing a historical and constitutional perspective on current events.

In this new volume, he brings together selected journalism, unpublished lectures, and new writing alongside personal recollections and reflections on his time observing postwar Britain, how it is governed, and those who do the governing. He reflects on the making and unmaking of prime ministers from Attlee to Truss, life in the House of Lords, and the changing constitutional landscape in the wake of Brexit and amid uncertainty about the future of the Union. Interspersed with lectures, journalism, and new pieces, Hennessy also looks back at a fascinating career, reflecting on his own experiences as a young green graduate navigating the hard-nosed world of Fleet Street in the 1970s, bringing to life a cast of characters from a world now largely gone. He revisits his time as a public historian, academic, and crossbench peer with a levity reflected in his belief that history is “gossip with footnotes.”
 

Pushing the Envelope, a survey history of the American aircraft (now aerospace) manufacturing industry, is the most comprehensive history on the subject ever completed. Though it covers the development of the industry from the beginnings of flight to the present, it provides far more than a simple chronology by analyzing key economic, military, technical, and international influences on the industry and showing how the industry has been instrumental in American military and technological leadership from its modest beginnings. Using original sources whenever available, Pushing the Envelope focuses on the business of aircraft. It is neither an aeronautical nor a production history of the industry, although both aspects are addressed. Instead, Donald M. Pattillo features the development and production of aircraft in different periods in the context of aeronautical progress. Pushing the Envelope also establishes that the central fact of the industry's existence, its dependence on military contracts, has been simultaneously its greatest strength and greatest vulnerability. Even during periods of military expansion, Pattillo illustrates, it has always been an unstable and insecure enterprise. Carefully researched, Pushing the Envelope also assesses the environmental impacts on the industry, including those pressures that have often led it into ethical dispute. Unlike any other technological industry, the unique qualities of the aircraft industry are truly paradoxical -- although it provides vital technical and production capability to the nation, demand for its capabilities may be influenced by external developments that it cannot foresee or influence. Pushing the Envelope transcends narrow disciplines, commingling aeronautical science and technology, business management, international business, the history of science and technology, national security studies, and international relations. Written in nontechnical language, it can easily be understood by a diverse audience, including industry and military professionals as well as the general public interested in aviation and technology.