City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Promised you a miracle, UK80-82, Andy Beckett

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

Promised you a miracle

bibliography

919209102

Andy Beckett

UK80-82

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

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?

general