Mark Garnett is a lecturer in politics at Lancaster University, and his previous books include The A-Z Guide to Modern British History. From Anger to Apathy addresses a wide range of political, social and cultural issues covering the past 30 years of British history. He is also the co-author of Splendid! Splendid! The Authorised Biography of Willie Whitelaw.

Mark Thwaite: What first gave you the idea for writing From Anger To Apathy: The Story of Politics, Society and Popular Culture in Britain since 1975?

Mark Garnett: I've spent a lot of time writing about the Thatcher years, and I thought it was time to look at the period from a slightly different perspective. In general, I think academics are too timid – they come to blows over the distant past and try not to say anything about the present. I’ve always believed that part of our job is to help us understand the way we live now; and the book was intended to be my own contribution to this task. The pay-off, of course, is that I was able to relive the public events of my own adult lifetime. It was an exercise in nostalgia, but with a practical purpose.

MT: How does your approach to the period differ from that of other historians?

MG: I'm tempted to say that the book is different because unlike most works of history it talks about the recent past... But that wouldn’t be fair, because contemporary history isn’t completely dead. The main methodological difference is that although there is a sort of chronology in my book, it’s presented in themes (Greed, Lust etc). I also tried to widen the perspective, and to weave in elements of popular culture rather than shuffling them into a cursory chapter at the end.

MT: What was the most difficult aspect of writing your book? How did you overcome it?

MG: There might be more tricky ways to write history, but I certainly found the thematic approach a considerable challenge. If you look for material which fits with your chosen themes you lose any sense of coherence in the book as a whole. So you have to plough through all the material you can lay your hands on, and let the themes emerge out of the general (messy) picture. Obviously I found this approach easier towards the end, so that by the time I’d sent off the manuscript I found myself wishing that I could start the whole thing again.

MT: How long did it take you to write and research From Anger to Apathy Mark?

MG: A couple of years, I think. I was doing other things for much of the time that the book was under contract – teaching, and for several months working as a research assistant to Michael Crick on his biography of Michael Howard.

MT: Do you enjoy the research or are you always itching to get down to the actual writing?

MG : I tend to do both at the same time, if I can. At least, if any thoughts occur to me after doing some research I usually try to put the ideas into a paragraph or two. So the initial draft of a chapter is a jumble of random thoughts, and then I have to try to stitch them together.

MT: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

MG: That’s a really interesting question. I used to write drafts in longhand, and then revise them as I typed them up. Now I compose directly onto the computer, print out the draft, realise it’s terrible and re-write the whole thing. I suppose that without the computer I would still be using the longhand method first, and your question makes me wonder whether my style would be any different. I seem to recall somewhere that Alexander Pope hardly ever revised his poems – the couplets just spilled out onto the page. I wonder what he would have done if someone had bought him a PC for Christmas?

MT: Your title seems to embody a thesis -- that lack of political involvement is apathy, but can't apathy be read as non-involvement in a political process that has proven time and time again to offer nothing but more of the same?

MG: Yes. The title was meant to be semi-ironic. Apathy implies lack of motivation, and obviously there is as much of that quality around as there ever was. However, I do think that the electorate as a whole is culpable to some extent in the lack of engagement; it doesn’t get the politicians and the press that it deserves, exactly, but intelligent voters are excessively tolerant of mediocrity. After a time you get to the position where the voters with the widest knowledge are the ones who are least likely to turn out – or at least, to vote with any enthusiasm for any of the options. So, as you say, what we call ‘apathy’ has a tendency to become self-reinforcing.

MT: Do you see an imminent return to anger/involvement with politics now that the economic forecast ahead is so gloomy?

MG: Well, it looks as though the dominant ideology of the last 30 years might have to face some unexpected challenges at last. You hear the name of Keynes a lot, after many years of obscurity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an overdue surge of interest in Marx – maybe not for his Utopian visions, but for his critique of capitalism which was always on the money (so to speak). However, the response to the problems has been typical of an ‘apathetic’ country – it seems that many people have swallowed Gordon Brown’s line about this being a time for experienced operators rather than novices. There’s plenty of anger around, but as usual it isn’t being channelled constructively.

MT: Do you read the critics? Have you been pleased with the responses to your book? Have you learned anything from them?

MG: I’m always reluctant to read reviews, but I get round to them in the end. I always knew that I was if for a set of mixed reviews this time, partly because the book is opinionated and guaranteed to annoy every reader at least some of the time, but also because many reviewers are roughly of my age and will have their own take on the recent past. The most irritating thing is that one or two reviewers imagined that a lot of my research had focused on newspaper headlines. Having spent about a year reading the content of newspapers, I can assure them that their assumption was ill-founded (I would rather have used a more robust phrase – authors don’t mind criticism of their mistakes, but you should never traduce their methods unless you know what you’re talking about).

MT: What do you do when you are not writing?

MG: Teaching at Lancaster, and over-indulging my two children.

MT: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

MG: I always try to aim at someone with a sceptical take on life, who is prepared to listen to alternative views and use dialogue as a way of developing their own ideas. I don’t write to persuade people that my own opinion is correct, and I’d be horrified if anyone agreed with all the arguments in this book. But it would be nice if it persuaded a few people that they haven’t reflected enough on the way we’ve been living over the past thirty years.

MT: What are you working on now Mark?

MG: I’ve just co-written a book on Conservative thinkers, with Kevin Hickson of Liverpool University. It’s more academic, but again it’s aimed at the general reader, too. It will be published by Manchester University Press next year. I’ve also finished work on the second edition of a textbook – Exploring British Politics – with Philip Lynch from Leicester University. An ongoing project is a study of the Conservative Party since 1997, which I’m writing for Palgrave with Andrew Denham (Nottingham) and Pete Dorey (Cardiff).

MT: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

MG: My favourite writer is William Hazlitt -- I wrote my doctorate on him and have felt very jealous of the people who’ve published books on him recently. His essay ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’ is undoubtedly the finest piece of writing in the English language. A.J.P. Taylor is a great hero of mine, for his style and general approach to the historian’s task. I loved the late Ian Gilmour’s work, and it was wonderful to work with him for many years. But if I was to name a ‘desert island book’, it would probably be Simon Schama’s Citizens – a real work of art.

MT: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer!?

MG: Treat every letter of rejection as an invitation to write something else.

MT: Anything else you would like to say?

MG: Thanks for the thought-provoking questions!