"In the bookshops, you could find some very good books firmly located in the 1980s which dealt with topics like the rise of Thatcher or the causes of the Brixton riots, but equally there was escapist fiction or interesting non-fiction that took out of everyday life. Not a year passed without something new and memorable landing on the shelves."As well as journalistic career that has included spells as chief political correspondent for the Observer and Daily Telegraph and his current role as senior writer for the Independent.
Andy McSmith is the author of five books: biographies of John Smith and Kenneth Clarke, a collection of short biographies called Faces of Labour, and a novel, Innocent in the House. His latest book, just out in paperback from Constable, is No Such Thing as Society – a history of Britain in the 1980s.
"Each decade leaves its imprint on the memory. Images from the 1980s suggest a time of excitement and bustle – Live Aid, Princess Diana, the Falklands War, mass pickets outside Rupert Murdoch's new Wapping plant, testosterone-driven yuppies doing frenetic trade on the floor of a deregulated stock market, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall coming tumbling down, apartheid in its final throes. The western world saw more social change in those 10 years than in any other decade since the war. "But the much used cliché about the curse of interesting times did not apply to the average person.
