One of our most celebrated historians shows how we can use the lessons of the past to build a new postcovid society in BritainThe 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 passedIn A Duty of Care Peter Hennessy divides postwar British history into BC before covid and AC after covid. He looks back to Sir William Beveridges 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 postwar 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 postcovid Britain with the ambition and on the scale that was achieved by the first.