Promised you a miracle : UK80-82 / Andy Beckett.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Beckett, Andy, 1969- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Great Britain--Politics and government--1979-1997.

Great Britain.

Politics and government.

Great Britain--Social conditions--1945-.

Social conditions.

Great Britain--History--Elizabeth II, 1952-2022.

History.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 435 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

[London, UK] : Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2015.

Summary:

Promised you a miracle is the extraordinary untold story of Britain's revolution in the head: a shift in mass consciousness in which an old, self-doubting nation was transformed into something else: outward-looking, materialistic, colourful, lonely and cruel. In the early eighties, a new world was messily brought into being: a miner's son transformed the rubble-strewn flatness of London's docklands into a new city centre of high rise and high finance; austere post-punk bands abandoned their leftwing politics and grey overcoats for glossy Trans-Atlantic careers; a loose-tongued, PR-savvy young socialist seized London's city hall and a small start-up in West Yorkshire, in the middle of the Falklands War, made a gadget the size of a gold bar that stopped the British task force from being blown apart. Leading us into these years of brittle optimism and upheaval, Andy Beckett asks why Britain changed so rapidly and fundamentally; what it felt like to be part of this convulsive change - or to be left behind; and how people were swept up in it, sometimes without realizing. Yet the effects of this revolution would ripple outwards, across the world - and we are still living with the consequences, happily or otherwise.

Contents:

Prologue: Ron's chair

Introduction: 'A small number of determined people'

Part one: Yearnings

A British car to beat the world

The year of flags

Part two: Morbid symptoms

The Liverpool model

Wait until dusk

Doom city

Part three: Stirrings

Winter thaw

'London's ours!'

Are you the cleaners?

Part four: Revolution in the head

Secret Thatcherites

Scams

Our friends in the south

We won

Part five: A new world

Cocaine and glass

A journey

'Loonies'

Epilogue: Whose miracle?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 391-407) and index.

ISBN:

9781846145155

1846145155

OCLC:

919209102