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Kindle Notes & Highlights
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Home Office
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July 14 - July 23, 2025
The First World War ended at 11.00 am on 11th November 1918 with victory for Britain and its allies.
In 1913, the British government promised ‘Home Rule’ for Ireland. The proposal was to have a self-governing Ireland with its own parliament but still part of the UK. A Home Rule Bill was introduced in Parliament. It was opposed by the Protestants in the north of Ireland, who threatened to resist Home Rule by force.
First World War led the British government to postpone any changes in Ireland.
1916 there was an uprising (the Easter Rising) against the...
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In 1921 a peace treaty was signed and in 1922 Ireland became two countries.
six counties in the north which were mainly Protestant remained part of the UK under the name Northern Ireland. The rest of Ireland became the Irish Free State. It had its own government and became a republic in 1949.
The conflict between those wishing for full Irish independence and those wishing to remain loyal to the British government is often referred to as ‘the Troubles’.
in 1929, the world entered the ‘Great Depression’ and some parts of the UK suffered mass unemployment.
shipbuilding were badly affected but new industries – including the automobile and aviation industries – developed.
Car ownership doubled from 1 million to 2 million between 1930 and 1939.
cultural blossoming, with writers such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh prominent.
The economist John Maynard Keynes published influential new th...
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The BBC started radio broadcasts in 1922 and began the world’s first regular tel...
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Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933.
Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Britain and France declared war in order to stop his aggression.
Axis powers (fascist Germany and Italy and the Empire of Japan) and the Allies.
allied side were the UK, France, Poland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and th...
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in 1940, German forces defeated allied troops and advanced through France. At this time of national crisis, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and Britain’s war leader.
Conservative MP in 1900, was a soldier and journalist. In May 1940 he became Prime Minister. He refused to surrender to the Nazis and was an inspirational leader to the British people in a time of great hardship. He lost the General Election in 1945 but returned as Prime Minister in 1951.
2002 was voted the greatest Briton of all time by the public.
‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’ Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons after he became Prime Minister, 1940
‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’ Speech to the House of Commons after Dunkirk (see below), 1940
‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’ Speech to the House of Commons during the B...
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As France fell, the British decided to evacuate British and French soldiers from France in a huge naval operation. Many civilian volunteers in small pleasure and fishing boats from Britain helped the Navy to rescue more than 300,000 men from the beaches around Dunkirk.
The evacuation gave rise to the phrase ‘the Dunkirk spirit’.
British resisted with their fighter planes and eventually won the crucial aerial battle against the Germans, called ‘the Battle of Britain’, in the summer of 1940.
Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain were the Spitfire and the Hurricane – which were designed and built in Britain.
German air force was able to continue bombing London and other British...
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This was called t...
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The phrase ‘the Blitz spirit’ is still used today to describe Britons pulling together in the face of adversity.
The United States entered the war when the Japanese bombed its naval base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941.
On 6 June 1944, allied forces landed in Normandy (this event is often referred to as ‘D-Day’). Following victory on the beaches of Normandy, the allied forces pressed on through France and eventually into Germany. The Allies comprehensively defeated Germany in May 1945.
The war against Japan ended in August 1945 when the United States dropped its newly developed atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Scientists led by New-Zealand-born Ernest Rutherford, working at Manchester and then Cambridge University, were the first to ‘split the atom’. Some British scientists went on to take part in the Manhattan Project in the United Stat...
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Born in Scotland, Fleming moved to London as a teenager and later qualified as a doctor. He was researching influenza (the ‘flu’) in 1928 when he discovered penicillin.
usable drug by the scientists Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.
Fleming won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945. Penicillin is still used to treat ba...
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During the war, there had been significant reforms to the education system and people now looked for wider social reforms.
In 1945 the British people elected a Labour government. The new Prime Minister was Clement Attlee, who promised to introduce the welfare state outlined in the Beveridge Report. In 1948, Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, the Minister for Health, led the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS),
colonies. In 1947, independence was granted to nine countries, including India, Pakistan and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Other colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific achieved independence over the next 20 years.
The UK developed its own atomic bomb and joined the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance of nations set up to resist the perceived threat of invasion by the Soviet Union and its allies.
Conservative government from 1951 to 1964. The 1950s were a period of economic recovery after the war and increasing prosperity for working people. The Prime Minister of the day, Harold Macmillan, was famous for his ‘wind of change’ speech about...
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became Prime Minister after the Labour Party won the 1945 election.
1945 to 1951 and led the Labour Party for 20 years.
1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the Beveridge Report).
Conservative MP in 1923 and held several positions before becoming responsible for education in 1941. In this role, he oversaw the introduction of the Education Act 1944 (often called ‘The Butler Act’), which introduced free secondary education in England and Wales.
His most well-known works include the radio play Under Milk Wood, first performed after his death in 1954, and the poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, which he wrote for his dying father in 1952. He died at the age of 39 in New York. There are several memorials to him in his birthplace, Swansea, including a statue and the Dylan Thomas Centre.
reconstruction. In 1948, people from the West Indies were also invited to come and work.
For about 25 years, people from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and (later) Bangladesh travelled to work and settle in Britain.
significant social change. It was known as ‘the Swinging Sixties’. There was growth in British fashion, cinema and popular music.