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Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s (Paperback)
Short Description for Crisis? What Crisis?* Popular history in the vein of Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had it So Good (9780316860833), David Kynaston's Austerity Britain (9780747585404) and Jon Savage's England's Dreaming (9780571227204) * Draws on extensive original interviews with the politicians, rock stars, actors and celebrities of the time including: Tony Benn, Zandra Rhodes, Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and James Herbert
Full description- Publisher: Aurum Press Ltd
- Published: 19 March 2009
- Format: Paperback 336 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: British & Irish History | Postwar 20th Century History, From C 1945 To C 2000 | First World War
- ISBN 13: 9781845134259 ISBN 10: 1845134257
- Sales rank: 170,895
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Our reviews for Crisis? What Crisis?
Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s
One of the most important jobs that history can do is to make what we think is familiar strange again. When we become estranged from engrained patterns of thinking we can then begin to think more clearly about a subject. We think we know how Britain was in the Seventies; and we think we know it was rubbish! Rubbish fashion, rubbish politics, rubbish industrial relations and rubbish not being collected because the binmen were on strike because of the rubbish industrial relations again! But Alwyn W. Turner's Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s (which can profitably be read alongside Andy Beckett's excellent When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies) reminds us there was far more to the Seventies than flares and flock wallpaper.
In many ways, the Seventies was a golden decade: it was when much that was started in the vaunted Sixties actually happened. For instance, wealth inequality was "at a record low" and, key for Turner's narrative, it was when popular culture really began to dominate the mainstream. The fascist National Front might have been on the march, inflation might have been on the rise, and power cuts might have been on everyone's mind, but Morecambe & Wise was on the telly, Get Carter was on at the pictures, and glam rock was giving way to the energy and DIY radicalism of punk.
Turner never pretends that, for instance, the Troubles in Northern Ireland weren't tragic nor that that shameful racism of an Enoch Powell wasn't unforgiveably troubling, but he does remind us that, for many in Britain, the Seventies was a decade we could do well to remember properly and that means seeing past the cliche that it has become and understanding the past for what it really was. Riveting. by Mark ThwaiteRating:
