Books by Andy Beckett

In the cold, dark summer of 1981, crowds gathering in Britain's streets could mean a royal wedding - or a riot. Margaret Thatcher's government, taking power on a promise of renewal, seemed in catastrophic decline. Britain remained troubled, inward-looking, run down by recession, transfixed by the threat of nuclear war. Yet, within this bleak landscape, something was stirring.Promised You A Miracle is the extraordinary untold story of Britain's revolution in the head: a shift in mass consciousness in which an old, self-doubting nation was transformed into something else: outward-looking, materialistic, colourful, lonely and cruel. In the early eighties, a new world was messily brought into being: a miner's son transformed the rubble-strewn flatness of London's docklands into a new city centre of high rise and high finance; austere post-punk bands abandoned their leftwing politics and grey overcoats for glossy transatlantic careers; a loose-tongued, PR-savvy young socialist seized London's city hall; and a small start-up in west Yorkshire, in the middle of the Falklands war, made a gadget the size of a gold bar that stopped the British task force from being blown apart.Leading us into these years of brittle optimism and upheaval, Andy Beckett asks why Britain changed so rapidly and fundamentally; what it felt like to be part of this convulsive change - or to be left behind; and how people were swept up in it, sometimes without realising. Yet the effects of this revolution would ripple outwards, across the world - and we are still living with the consequences, happily or otherwise.

The seventies are probably the most important and fascinating period in modern British political history. They encompass strikes that brought down governments, shock general election results, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of Edward Heath, the IMF crisis, the Winter of Discontent and the three-day week.But the seventies have also been frequently misunderstood, oversimplified and misrepresented. When the Lights Went Out goes in search of what really happened, what it felt like at the time, and where it was all leading. It includes vivid interviews with many of the leading participants, many of them now dead, from Heath to Jack Jones to Arthur Scargill, and it travels from the once-famous factories where the great industrial confrontations took place to the suburbs where Thatcherism was created and to remote North Sea oil rigs.The book also unearths the stories of the forgotten political actors away from Westminster who gave the decade so much of its volatility and excitement, from the Gay Liberation Front to the hippie anarchists of the free festival movement. Over five years in the making, this book is not an academic history but something for the general reader, written with the vividness of a novel or the best works of American New Journalism, bringing the decade back to life in all its drama and complexity.

In October 1998, the erstwhile Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London, charged with crimes against humanity by a Spanish magistrate.