Between the Waves

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Longlisted for the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionBR>A gripping, persuasive and authoritative account of Britain's long and fractious relationship with Europe.In Between the Waves, acclaimed journalist Tom McTague explores the underground history of Britain's Brexit revolution, chronicling the battle of ideas, events and personalities that first took the country into the European Union, only to take it back out again in an explosive referendum a little over forty years later.This is a story of high ambition and low politics, vanity and hubris, journeying back decades before Brexit to the seeds of ideological conflict that were sown between major political figures in the fight for the future of Europe—Charles de Gaulle, Harold Macmillan, Jean Monnet (the founding father of the European Union) and Margaret Thatcher.Building on meticulous research, unpublished sources and exclusive interviews, this immensely readable book is as provocative as it is enlightening, showing how Thatcher's legacy led a rag-tag group of ardent right-wing rebels, including Dominic Cummings, Patrick Robertson (founder of the Eurosceptic Bruges group while still at Oxford) and Nigel Farage, from the brink of obscurity to landmark victory in a little over a generation.Illuminating the grand historical, economic, social, and diplomatic forces that coalesced to produce the Brexit earthquake of 2016, Between the Waves provides a gripping analysis of one of the defining political stories of our time. For readers of Rory Stewart, Tim Shipman, David Kynaston, and Dominic Sandbrook. Show more