«This book is a very important new development in British social history, offering a fresh take on a coherent story of the British people. Its choice to focus on marginalised groups - women, disabled people, Gypsy Roma Traveller people and queer people brings to light many stories that have seldom been told and even more rarely highlighted at secondary school level. The book justifies its focus in an academically rigorous and historiographically informed way, noting that there is never one single story about THE British people. The decision to frame the book as a 'social history' rather than a specialist history of just disabled people, for example, is equally important in terms of pushing these marginalised stories to the centre and therefore offering a new perspective on British history as a whole. Throughout the book, effort is made to deconstruct how history is written, to give pupils an insight into the decisions that are made about what to include and exclude (this is addressed in interviews with archivists and book publishers, as well as with historians), which provides a robust theoretical underpinning to the content focus of the book. The book also grapples effectively with how language changes and what terminology historians should use.»

Dr Laura Schwartz, Reader in Modern British History, University of Warwick