A book to gorge on - Rated 
Born in 1969, my memories of the 1970s are limited, but I do recall the National Front at their peak; being forced to choose between Arsenal, my local football team, and Spurs, supported by my dad; glue sniffers allegedly controlling the council estates; my parents' finding punk so totalling incomprehensible; power cuts; and hot summers with plastic car seats that burnt your arms and legs. And it all ending in tears, with the election of Thatcher.
Andy Beckett's biography of the decade rings true and explains so much. This is a book to gorge on.
Journalistic, rather than scholarly, When the Lights Went Out nevertheless benefits from an incredibly broad research base and author interviews with a great many key players like style and culture gurus, workers who featured in newspapers during the three-day week, politicians of every hue, strike makers and breakers and would be militiamen. Strangely, with each visit the subject appears to still be living in the past.
Naturally, there are parallels with today, but these are too easily overstated. By the end the 1970s appears ever so foreign, truly a different country.
Turning the spotlight on the 70s - Rated
Beckett's book is huge both in length and in detail, but the pace rarely flags and provides a fascinating account of what is now perceived as a tumultuous decade. And although the book is mainly a political and economic history of the period, Beckett's interviews with key people of the time bring out the personal, the human, dimension. Thus we meet Edward Heath, well into his eighties, brusque in manner, unsmiling, admitting that his government had "struggles in some areas", and Denis Healy, cheerfully admitting that when he was appointed Chancellor he "knew bugger all about economics".
We think of the 70s now as the decade of bankrupt Britain, of rampant inflation and industrial unrest. As Beckett makes clear, the picture was far more complicated than that.
The humiliation of the £2 billion loan from the IMF in 1976 for instance, the largest in IMF history, is the stuff of legend, but as the book points out, half of the loan was never used and it was paid back early. There is even some doubt as to whether a loan was actually needed. The incident reveals Jim Callaghan's mastery of political skills in getting agreement for the loan application through Cabinet.
A thoroughly recommended read.
Amazon censor left-wing reviews? - Rated 
Do Amazon censor left-wing reviews? I submitted a favourable review of this book, with a left-wing bias, twice. On neither occasion was it passed by Amazon. No offensdive remarks, no bad taste, just a left-wing review. Has anyone else experienced Amazon flexing its arm as a political censor?
The 70s brought to life - Rated
I enjoyed this book, which brought the seventies back to life for me. It's a very detailed book, using original material such as diaries, letters, personal memoirs as well as books written about the period. It's very readable and I particularly liked the personal, face-to-face interviews with some of the key figures such as Ted Heath, and his assessments of politicians - for example, Margaret Thatcher in 1975 when she was a contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
When Beckett describes the strikes of the decade, and there were so many, the changes in the balance of power, the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent, I was back there living it all over again. My only criticism is a personal one - when he writes about the economic and financial situations with all the statistics he quotes I was a bit bored and have to admit that I skim read those sections. It was the personalities, the personal touches and the cultural and social scenes that I liked - for example during his interview with Denis Healey, who was Harold Wilson's Chancellor of the Exchequer in the seventies Healey talked about Wilson's lack of ambition.
As well as the personalities I also liked his descriptions of places, comparing how they are today with how they were in the seventies and his comparisons of the crises that faced Britain then with those facing us today.
Good - but a little episodic - Rated 
Very enjoyable read and a good objective assessment of Heath and Callaghan's "failures". Both come out of this in a better light than some histories sometimes give them and it is a good indicator that the difference between success and failure is often very small.
The book manages to make you feel you are taking a peek behind thew scenes as some of the great events of the decade unfold and allows, where possible, key players to talk for themselves.
Where the book is less sucessful, for me, is in capturing the feeling of the time for those whose post war culture was rapidly disappearing and the bewilderment they felt. The 70's were as much a world populated by those who lived through the second world war, (and the first), as they were the breeding ground of later thinking. I would have liked to have got more of a feeling of what was being lost as well as what was being built.
The book is also very episodic and the events described were a bit too compartmentalised for me. Having said that - it was a page turner andf occasionally induced groans as my memory was jogged at the mistakes that were made.
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