One of our most celebrated historians shows how we can use the lessons of the past to build a new post-covid society in Britain

The duty of care which the state owes to its citizens is a phrase much used, but what has it actually meant in Britain historically? And what should it mean in the future, once the immediate Covid crisis has passed?

In A Duty of Care, Peter Hennessy divides post-war British history into BC (before covid) and AC (after covid). He looks back to Sir William Beveridge's classic identification of the "five giants" against which society had to battle - want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness - and laid the foundations for the modern welfare state in his wartime report. He examines the steady assault on the giants by successive post-war governments and asks what the comparable giants are now. He lays out the "road to 2045" with "a new Beveridge" to build a consensus for post-covid Britain with the ambition and on the scale that was achieved by the first.