Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s

The 1970s. They were the best of times and the worst of times. Wealth inequality was at a record low, yet industrial strife was at a record high. These were the glory years of Doctor Who and glam rock, but the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict. Beset by strikes, inflation, power cuts and the rise of the far right, the cosy Britain of the post-war consensus was unravelling - in spectacularly lurid style. Fusing high politics and low culture, Crisis? What Crisis? presents a world in which Enoch Powell, Ted Heath and Tony Benn jostle for space with David Bowie, Hilda Ogden and Margo Leadbetter, and reveals why a country exhausted by decline eventually turned to Margaret Thatcher for salvation.

'This well-researched and witty text recounts how the media reflected politics in an era of glamour, bad fashion and inflation... displays wit, colour and detail' -- Brian Groom, Financial Times

'Vivid, brilliantly researched... Turner may be an anorak, but he is an acutely intelligent anorak' -- Francis Wheen, New Statesman

'An ambitious, entertaining alternative history of the 1970s which judges the decade not just by its political turbulence but by the leg-up it gave popular culture' Time Out