Francis Wheen

When Candlemakers Got Rich

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

By

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.’

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Start your week with a dose of Russian Revolutionary zeal. Donald Rayfield reviews Tobie Mathew's 'Greetings From t… ,
    • A treat from the LR Archive: exactly 20 years ago, Malcolm Bradbury reviewed John Updike's 'Bech at Bay' ,
    • ‘When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack’ John Lanchester's dy… ,
    • Man with a Bloody Paintbrush: Robin Simon on Lucian Freud ,
    • Jane Ridley reviews The Diaries of Kenneth Rose (ed. D R Thorpe) ,
    • ‘Look,’ says Trump. ‘The fact is I’m only human.’ On the evidence of this book that point is debatable. From the A… ,
    • From our December/January issue - here's John Banville's review of Colm Tóibín on the fathers of Wilde, Yeats and J… ,
    Follow Us