Before the discussion, the third Literary Leicester festival will be officially opened by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Robert Burgess.

Chair: Tom Holland

The past, we are often told, is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in the last few years, two of Britain's most talented historians have shed new light on the day before yesterday, bringing alive the vanished world of post-war Britain for a new generation of readers.

In the books of David Kynaston, (Austerity Britain, Family Britain) and Dominic Sandbrook (Never Had It So Good, White Heat, State of Emergency), we are catapulted back to the threadbare Forties, the booming Fifties, the swinging Sixties and the gaudy Seventies, to a world that seems so familiar and yet so remote.

This event brings together for the first time the two popular historians of modern Britain to discuss how we have changed as a nation over the last half-century, and how they go about recreating a disappearing world.

David Kynaston was born in 1951 and has been a professional historian since the 1970s. He has written extensively on the City of London, including a four-volume history of the City between 1815 and 2000. His current project is a history of Britain between 1945 and 1979, of which the first two volumes are the best-selling Austerity Britain (chosen by The Sunday Times as its Book of the Decade) and Family Britain.

Dominic Sandbrook is one of Britain's best-known historians. Born in 1974 and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, he has written about both American and British history, including his acclaimed bestsellers on the 1950s and 1960s, Never Had It So Good and White Heat, which the Daily Telegraph chose as one of the 'books that defined the Noughties”'. In 2007 Waterstones named him as one of their '25 Authors for the Future'. His new book, State of Emergency, tells the story of Britain in the early 1970s: the age of strikes, sitcoms, gay rights and glam rock.

Tom Holland is an author and historian. His first work of history, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. His second, Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, won the Anglo-Hellenic League's Runciman Award. His new book, Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom is out now, published by Little, Brown.

• This is a ticketed event. For free tickets, please contact Embrace Arts (see box top right).

• Followed by a book signing.

Links

• David Kynaston microsite on Bloomsbury Publishing website
• Dominic Sandbrook's blog on BBC History Magazine website
• Tom Holland's website