State of Emergency: Britain 1970-1974, By Dominic Sandbrook

Gramsci's famous remark about the old dying, the new not yet being born and a variety of "morbid symptoms" declaring themselves in the interval is a bit too often quoted these days. All the same, it is uncannily prophetic of the period in British history covered by the rise and fall of Edward Heath's government, a time when the consequences of having won the Second World War but lost the peace that followed had become dramatically apparent to everyone but the losers.