Reading List
Andy Beckett
Journalist and Historian
Andy Beckett is a British journalist and historian who writes for The Guardian and the London Review of Books. He read modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
Pinochet in Piccadilly (2002) traces the hidden links between Britain and Chile. When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009) revisits a decade usually remembered only for strikes and decline. Promised You a Miracle (2015) argues that the years 1980 to 1982 made modern Britain, and The Searchers (2024) follows five rebels on the British left and their idea of a different country.
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Los Angeles
by Reyner Banham
“Banham celebrates Los Angeles much more than Davis. But, like Peter York, this book’s appeal to me is as much to do with its style as its content. It’s freewheeling and observational about the texture of life: he jumps from very grand, famous buildings to petrol stations. I often try to do that in my own writing – to be quite intensely descriptive and dart between high and low politics regardless of the barrier.” — via Interview, February 2013
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Thinking the Unthinkable
by Richard Cockett
“That it developed through the 50s and 60s, with the radical right seen as ridiculous for quite some time, until it found its moment in the 70s. These movements often build slowly; they can take decades to achieve a head of steam and win over enough converts. Cockett really anatomises that. It sounds like an incredibly boring book if you read the subtitle. But it’s very readable.” — via Interview, February 2013
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The History Man
by Malcolm Bradbury
“Yes, to a degree. Certainly, Wilson was undermined by people in the intelligence services, as has now been documented in the official history of MI5. But bear in mind that it kept files on a huge number of people in the 70s – almost as many as the Stasi kept in the former East Germany. They had files on all kinds of trade-union activists, including Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman, and other centre-left figures.” — via Interview, February 2013
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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
by John le Carré
“But that atmosphere always assumes exaggerated form in newspaper leaders and magazine articles, because people like gothic things. You can find them in any decade if you want to write a gothic book. Even in the 90s, not a particularly dark time. But I find the darkness in le Carré particularly interesting because it’s quite melancholic. It evokes a sadness about Britain and the establishment at that time.” — via Interview, February 2013
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Style Wars
by Peter York
“York’s methodology is fascinating. What he did in the 70s was an English version of Tom Wolfe: this kind of zany, insider prose that takes everyday life seriously. But while he was clearly influenced by Wolfe’s work in the 60s, York’s writing is distinctly English in style.” — via Interview, February 2013