After World War II Britain found itself unable to keep up with the military arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It soon gave up the idea of an independent nuclear deterrent, and in 1962 took American ‘Polaris’ nuclear missiles for British submarines. As a result, Britain was tied even more closely to the USA.
Britain supported the USA in many political matters which alarmed its European partners. In 1986 Britain allowed US aircraft to use British airfields from which the Americans attacked the Lybian capital, Tripoli. One thing was clear to Europeans: Britain still had not made up its mind whether its first political loyalty lay across the Atlantic or in Europe. As a result of this pro-American policy Britain lost its position in Europe.
At the end of the 1970s unemployment rose rapidly, reaching 3.5 million by 1985. It was highest in the industrial north of England and in Belfast, Clydeside and southeast Wales – the same places that had suffered most during the Great Depression in the 1930s. In 1979-1981 the country was hit by an economic crisis. In 1984 coal miners launched a general strike in protest against pit closures. They were supported by workers in other industries, especially by dock workers and those in the shipbuilding industry. After a year of violence, during which miners fought with the police, the strike was called off. The government headed by Margaret Thatcher won a victory in the greatest industrial conflict of the century. The years of ‘Thatcherism’ finally brought the country out of the deadlock economically, no matter how unpopular her measures might have seemed at moments.
Margaret Thatcher was elected to Parliament as the Tory leader in 
1979 and resigned her post to another Tory, John Major, in 1990. It was also during her rule that Britain established closer relations with the USSR. Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister who actually put an end to the Cold War in Europe.
In February 1991 the British troops were involved in the Gulf War, where they assisted American and other coalition forces to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army out of the occupied Kuwait. The economy showed signs of deep recession. High inflation and sagging production were now accompanied by rising unemployment, which even affected the City ‘yuppies’ (young urban professionals). And finally the Tories lost a general election and Tony Blair became the new Labour Prime Minister.
Blair started his first term of office with introducing a poll tax which at once made him far less popular than during the election campaign, and announcing that Britain was going to build socialism. The idea, though, was soon forgotten.
Probably the most unpopular move of the Blair government so far has been Britain’s involvement in the Iraqi war. But recent events have shown again that Britain still remains the most faithful ally of the USA.
Britain experienced new social problems, particularly after the arrival of immigrants in Britain. Most immigrants lived together in poor areas of large cities. By 1985, almost half this black population had been born in Britain.
One of the problems still topical today is unemployment. Black people find it harder to obtain employment. The government passed laws to prevent unequal treatment of ‘coloured’ people, as well as control the number of immigrants coming to Britain every year. Sometimes, in order to fully carry out these laws, immigration officers resorted to such measures as detention of people at airports or separation of members of the same family. These barbaric measures were explained by the fact that the huge inflow of immigrants, especially to the old 19th-century industrial centres caused economic problems which finally led to riots and inter-racial clashes.
If we look back at Victorian literature, we can see that the English novels of the 19th century were written at a time of great confidence in British society, culture and political organization. The writers of the 20th century could not share this confidence. The changes in beliefs and political ideas were influenced strongly by the events of the two World Wars and by the events across the world that led to the disappearance of the British Empire.
· Fiction
The leading writers at the beginning of the 20th century were Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, David Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, John Galsworthy and George Bernard Shaw.
Rudyard Kipling, who was born in India and was a true Briton, a patriot and an advocate of the ideology of the British Empire. He is the author of The Jungle Book, Kim and numerous stories. H.G. Wells, the author of The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, the War of the Worlds, was interested in the scientific advances of his age and looked ahead to imagine what the results might be in the future. David Lawrence, the author of Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, felt it was the writer’s job to show how an individual’s personality was affected by conventions of the language, family and religion. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, gave a picture of a society so heavily organized and controlled that the only way for people to be themselves lay in escape. James Joyce was born and educated in Ireland and spent most of his adult life in Europe, mainly in France, Italy and Switzerland. His first stories, published as Dubliners, are realistic on the surface but also carry a deeper meaning. His most famous book, Ulysses, is regarded as one of the most important novels written in English in the 20th century. In Ulysses, Joyce created a completely new style of writing which allows the reader to move inside the minds of the characters. He presents their thoughts and feelings in a continuous stream, breaking all the usual rules of description, speech and punctuation. This style is known as “interior” monologue or “stream of consciousness”, and it has had a powerful influence on the work of many other writers. The novel is funny, touching and often satirical; some events are clearly fanciful, while other parts of the book are completely realistic.
Virginia Woolf also attempted to explore the consciousness of her characters (in fact, she was the original inventor of the style known as “the stream of consciousness”) But she did not attempt to deal with so many types of people and situations as James Joyce was.
The writer who vividly depicted the problems of social and family relations of the period was John Galsworthy (1868-1933). He was one of the last representatives of critical realism in English literature – a novelist, dramatist, short-story writer and essayist taken together. His mastery as a writer lies in his criticism of national prejudices, exciting plots and a realistic observation of life and characters. His works give the most complete and critical picture of English middle-class (mostly upper-middle class) society at the beginning of the 20th century. The Forsyte Saga followed by The Modern Comedy describes three generations of the Forsyte family – its ups and downs. The elder generation saw the coronation of Queen Victoria, their children saw her funeral. Soames Forsyte, the Man of Property, possesses all characteristic features typical of the English society at the turn of the century. The Forsytes live through the social and political changes that shook the British society: the movement for women’s rights, the Victorian reforms, the Boer War and the First World War. They see the end of Britain’s glory.
Although Galsworthy excelled as a novelist he is as well known as a dramatist, the author of numerous plays. In his creative work Galsworthy was strongly influenced by Russian and French literature.
Galsworthy enjoyed popularity in his lifetime. Much of his energy was devoted to the Pen-club, an association of writers of which he was president until his death in 1933.
The first notable post-war trend in English literature was represented by the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ in the 1950s and 1960s. This group included the novelists John Waine, John Braine and Kingsley Amis. They attacked outmoded social values left over from the pre-war world. Another ‘angry young man’ was John Osborne. In his play Look Back in Anger he shows Jimmy Porter, a young man from a middle-class family whose protest took a ridiculous form and made him feel his own uselessness.
Among other prominent writers of the post-war period was Charles Percey Snow who wrote Strangers and Brothers, The Affair, Corridors of Power – the title has ever since become a byword.
John Boynton Priestley, who started writing in the late 20s, lived well into the 80s. To him we owe the plays Time and the Conways, The Inspector Calls, the novels Festival at Farbridge, The Lost Empire, The Magician, Angel Pavement and many others.
George Orwell is mostly known for his anti-utopian novels Animal Farm and 1984. William Golding, the author of a wide inventive range of fiction, explored human evil in his novels Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors and The Paper Men. Golding won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. John Le Carre (the pen-name of David Cornwell) won popularity for his complex spy-stories The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, The Russia House and The Night Manager.
The 20th-century classic of English literature, Graham Greene, was born in 1904 and died in 1991. His first book, The Man Within, was written while he was still an Oxford student. Since 1930 onwards he devoted himself entirely to literary work. Before World War II he became known as the author of the novels The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory. In 1941 he was sent by the Foreign Office on a mission to Sierra Leone where he remained until 1943. In 1944 he wrote for an anti-fascist journal which was illegally published in France.
After the war, he wrote The Heart of the Matter (where the action is set in Africa), The Quiet America (Vietnam), Our Man in Havana (a mock spy-story), Travels with my Aunt and many others. One of his last novels was Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party. In all, Graham Greene wrote some 30 novels, entertainments, plays, children’s books, travel books, collections of essays and short stories.
Poetry
Two of the most remarkable poets of the 20th century who continued tradition and experiment in their work were William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot.
W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet, was the more traditional of the two. In his romantic poetry written at the turn of the century, he exploited ancient Irish traditions, and then gradually developed a powerful and rich poetic language. He reached his maturity in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Yeats was a Nobel Prize winner.
T.S. Eliot was born in the USA in 1888. After graduating from Harvard University, he went to England where he worked as a teacher in a boys’ school and later worked at Lloyd’s Bank in London.
Eliot is not just the most discussed poet of our time; he is, perhaps, the most important figure in the modern poetic tradition. In 1948 Mr. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize ‘for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry.’ His best-known things are Four Quarters, Murder in the Cathedral (describing the murder of Thomas Becket), The Family Reunion, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (which was made into a musical) and The Cocktail Party – these are plays in verse. The musical Cats is still on in London.
Drama
George Bernard Shaw, the most prominent dramatist of the century, was born in Ireland but spent most of his long adult life in England. He started his career with writing critical articles on music and literature. In the late 1880s he took to reading literature on social subjects, including The Capital by Karl Marx. At the same time he took an active part in the work of Fabian Society, which aimed at turning Britain into a socialist society.
Bernard Shaw satirized the faults of the British system of government and was justly nicknamed “the bad boy of the nation”. An important aim of his plays was to face the audience with completely new points of view. Shaw vividly described the evils of contemporary society in his Plays Unpleasant, which included Widower’s Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession. He enjoyed the shock and offence this often produced, particularly when his ideas were expressed with much wit. Even in Plays Pleasant (Pygmalion, Arms and the Man, The Apple Cart) he remained true to himself. He delighted in saying and showing the opposite of what his audiences expected. (In The Devil’s Disciple the man whom conventional society thought of as evil and selfish was ready to sacrifice himself for others.) Pygmalion is particularly well known because it was the basis for the musical play and film My Fair Lady. In the story of the professor who takes a flower-girl from the London streets and makes her into a lady, it is behaviour and not only the language that really shows the difference between the characters. For Eliza, the flower-girl, the most important thing in human relationships is that people care about each other. For Professor Higgins, the most important thing is that they help each other to improve themselves. Shaw delights in showing opposing attitudes in sharp and witty language that often turn upside down the accepted opinion of his time.
Apart from the later plays by George Bernard Shaw, the most important drama produced in English in the first half of the 20th century came from another Irish writer, Sean O’Casey, who continued the movement known as the Irish Renaissance. Later, there came to the front another Irish-born novelist and dramatist – Samuel Beckett who got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. He lived for a long time in France and wrote his laconic symbolic works in French and then translated them himself into English. His most famous play is Waiting for Godot (1952). Both English and American audiences enthusiastically received the plays by Tom Stoppard. His plays, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966) is often staged by Moscow theatres.
· Music
Although classical music in Britain is a minority interest, Britain has made its contribution to its development in the 20th century. The leading British composer was Benjamin Britten, the author of the opera Peter Grimes and a world masterpiece – The War Requiem, which became one of the major anti-war music pieces. Britten was also an outstanding pianist and conductor.
In the 1960s, British musicians also influenced the development of European and even world music: The Beatles signified a new tendency in popular music. The group brought unprecedented sophistication to rock music and symbolized the personal and political rebellion and search for identity of many teenagers and young adults of the 1960s. The group was formed in 1960 and dissolved in 1970, it consisted of four Liverpool-born musicians: George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and, after 1962, Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey). From the simple, fresh style of early songs such as I Want to Hold Your Hand, the Beatles progressed to innovative, experimental works such as the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Since the 1960s, popular music in Britain has been an enormous and profitable industry.
Changes in the language
In recent decades the English language in the UK has undergone certain phonetic, lexical and grammatical changes:
o Instead of the sound [W] we now hear [a] in the words ‘apple, sand, Trafalgar Square’. The sound [e] as in the words ‘letter, send’ has become more open – [E].
o There is a general tendency to use the verb ‘to arrive’ rather than ‘to come’; the phrase ‘I would like’ instead of ‘I want’ and, naturally, the words ‘joyful, lively’ instead of ‘gay’ which is now used in the meaning of ‘homosexual’
o 1. The verb ‘will’ has distinctly become purely modal, especially in what we used to know as the Future Indefinite (Simple) Tense. Hence, most linguists now prefer to speak about the ways of expressing a future action (including “will” for a future action) rather than speak about the use of Future Indefinite. At the same time, Future Continuous is being increasingly used. 2. The difference in use between the modal verbs ‘can’ and ‘may’ denoting permission has practically disappeared.
