April 2014 Non-Fiction Book of the Month.
The 1990’s - the last decade and already how far away it seems, some of the attitudes, the fashions and the politics make it seem a distant time, older and wiser, we’re glad to have survived. This attempt to catch the 1990’s and its affect on Britain is largely successful and in its way a triumph. Especially good is the knitting together of high politics and low culture with everything in between and at over 600 pages a long, deliciously detailed trawl through a decade and a bit.
Like for Like Reading
No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980's, Andy McSmith
Austerity Britain 1945-1951, David Kynaston
| Primary Genre | Non-Fiction Books of the Month |
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When Margaret Thatcher was ousted from Downing Street in November 1990, after eleven years of bitter social and economic conflict, many hoped that the decade to come would be more 'caring'; others dared to believe that the more radical policies of her revolution might even be overturned. Across politics and culture there was an apparent yearning for something the Iron Lady had famously dismissed: society. Yet the forces that had warred over the country during the 1990s were to prevent any simple turning back of the clock. The 'New Britain' to emerge under John Major and Tony Blair would be a contradiction: economically unequal but culturally classless. Whilst Westminster agonised over sleaze and the ERM, the country outside became the playground of the New Lad and his sister the Ladette, of Swampy and the YBAs, of Posh and Becks and Jarvis Cocker. A new era was dawning which promised to connect us via the 'information superhighway' and entertain us with 'docusoaps'. It was also a period that would see old moral certainties swept aside, and once venerable institutions descend into farce - followed, in the case of the Royal Family, by tragedy. Opening with a war in the Gulf and ending with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, A Classless Society goes in search of the decade when modern Britain came of age. What it finds is a nation anxiously grappling with new technologies, tentatively embracing new lifestyles, and, above all, forging a new sense of what it means to be British.
A Classless Society Britain in the 1990s features in the following genres: Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Biographies & Autobiographies, Books of the Month, History, Recommendations, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, History and Archaeology
A Classless Society Britain in the 1990s is available in Paperback
A Classless Society Britain in the 1990s was written by Alwyn W. Turner and published by Aurum Press Ltd
A Classless Society Britain in the 1990s has 640 pages
£18.00
