Happy New Year

I should wish you a prosperous and happy new year. I began it by reading the final 50 pages of Andy Beckett's When the Lights Went Out: A History of the Seventies. It felt very fitting to conclude 1979 on the first day of 2011.

Then, a Tory government which got elected by pretending to be nice was planning a full-scale attack on the poor. A Labour government which had got as much right as wrong fell because it seemed exhausted and directionless. The faces on the television were remarkably similar, and the reactionary jokes of the Tarbucks, Mannings and co seemed little different from those of the Boyles, McIntyres and their lazy ilk. Cities were falling apart and the country was the preserve of the rich, a bunch of amoral toffs with little experience of or care for the lives of the rest of us.

Plus ça change, plus ça meme chose.

For sale

I accidentally ordered 2 copies of the same book, at huge expense.

So if anyone would like to buy Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in the single-volume edition, let me know and we'll do a deal. The used copy cost me £27 and the new one £47. Damn it.

To make me feel better, I also got a reprint of Green Lantern, Green Arrow vol. 1 (from the 1970s Silver Age rebirth), Berry's Shakespeare and Social Class, and Dominic Sandbrook's new one, State of Emergency, The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, which is the year before I was born. There seems to be a huge vogue for 1970s histories at the moment - looking back to an earlier period of cultural and economic decay. Hope it's up to the standards of Francis Wheen's masterpiece.