Divided Kingdom writes the history of twentieth-century Britain through the lens of inequalities, divisions of wealth and power among Britain’s four nations, its relationship with empire/commonwealth, whose fault-lines – class, generation, gender, ethnicity, religion and region – shape how people live and what they can hope for. Aspiration and hope figure strongly in Pat Thane’s description of modern Britain. Writing in the long aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crash, during the austerity policies of the Coalition and Conservative governments with the clamour of Brexit ringing in her ears, Pat Thane – a contemporary historian of social policy whose previous work tracks the limits of liberal democracy across two or more centuries – asks how did we arrive at the present vertiginous economic, political and constitutional crisis? Why despite higher living standards and longer lives, does poverty continue to blight lives in Britain, the fifth richest nation in the OECD in 2017?