Rejoice, Rejoice!

The Eighties may seem to many of us like yesterday, but they are already two decades ago. Not only have we already become nostalgic for them, but in many ways the decade does seem like a thoroughly foreign country. During the years when Thatcherism wiped out almost a quarter of Britain's heavy industry by savagely monetarist policies, a naval Task Force also sailed to re-take an insular outpost in the South Atlantic. In the same decade as the extraordinary pitched battles of the miners' strike, Boy George sweetly crooned "Karma Chameleon". As the world faced the early days of panic over the AIDS virus, pop stars took to the stage at Live Aid. Alwyn Turner's in-depth history of this most fascinating of decades has been highly praised by distinguished commentators like Dominic Sandbrook and Francis Wheen. If the Seventies, the subject of his previous book, were the last gasp of the old Britain, the Eighties were a truly transitional, politically revolutionary decade, when Thatcherism remade Britain's economy and its society, but when Britain's social fabric also changed in many infinitely more encouraging ways.
Witty and formidably well-informed on political intrigue as well as every last soap opera and rock album, this is an exciting piece of genuinely new history.