Matt, btw, you heard of Plan Y? Fascinating, fortunately unexecuted plan by the British to invade Iran:

www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/bbc-timew...he-first-oil-crisis/

Suez.

An amazing thing reading about this period is how far into empire even some leftwingers were. Manny Shinwell, for instance, was one of those worried everyone would take liberties with Britain if they gave way to the Arabs wanting better deals.

Tubby Isaacs wrote:
Matt, btw, you heard of Plan Y? Fascinating, fortunately unexecuted plan by the British to invade Iran:

That film looks boss, cheers Chris

"Old Mossy" was a very interesting character.

Oi, you two, this is Books, you can't just go having a ding dong back and forth exchange every few minutes. Slow down. It's like a library - too much kerfuffle and we'll chuck you out.

Heh.

I'm too old to do the sort of post IMP demands of me.

A few months on from the last post…
I've just finished reading this. I thought it was very well-written. It struck a fine balance between depth and breadth, choosing a couple of dozen episodes to illustrate the grand themes of the decade, rather than burying the narrative beneath exhaustive details of who did what.
I found a couple of weaknesses. Firstly, there's no chapter on the City or the business environment in general. The story of the IEA is interesting and merits its place, and there's some great writing about industrial decline and conflict. But the 1970s were crucial in, for example, the development of commodities trading and the growth of high-yield (junk) bond markets. I didn't get a sense from Beckett's book of the changes that were taking place in the financial sector — changes that were as much personal and generational as they were structural, and without which the Thatcherite vision of the economy would have been unimaginable.
Also, I'm always bothered by histories whose beginning and end points are determined by something as arbitrary as a year ending in zero. Beckett almost overcomes this problem by tackling the Seventies in retrospect, as a mythology. But towards the end it seems to drift into an essay about the origins of Thatcherism. I think that's because the history-of-a-decade format lacks an inherent conclusion to build up to. In any case, I found the story rather narrowed towards the end, and at a time of enormous unrest in the world, from Iran and Afghanistan to Cambodia and Rhodesia, with the NF and the IRA making British people seem vulnerable too, the focus seemed to be entirely on Mrs Thatcher and the Westminster bubble.

laverte wrote:
But the 1970s were crucial in, for example, the development of commodities trading and the growth of high-yield (junk) bond markets.

This is more dglh's territory, but didn't those innovations mostly originate in New York? That would be an obvious reason to leave them out.

In any case, I found the story rather narrowed towards the end, and at a time of enormous unrest in the world, from Iran and Afghanistan to Cambodia and Rhodesia, with the NF and the IRA making British people seem vulnerable too, the focus seemed to be entirely on Mrs Thatcher and the Westminster bubble.

Although, to be fair, it was a history of Britain in the 70s...