Francis Wheen
When Candlemakers Got Rich
When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
By Andy Beckett
Faber & Faber 592pp £20 order from our bookshop
Andy Beckett was born in 1969. ‘I have been hearing what was wrong with Britain and British politics in the Seventies all my adult life,’ he complains. ‘No other theme has been as unrelenting. The Seventies were grim. The Seventies were the hangover from the Sixties. The Seventies were violent. The Seventies were a dead end. Above all: we don’t want to go back to the Seventies.’
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