For millennials, pre-Thatcher Britain must seem another — quite mystifying — country

Lymeswold; Hi-de-Hi!; nuclear-free zones; Walkmans; the Metro; Red Robbo; the SDP; Michael Foot’s Cenotaph donkey-jacket; Protest and Survive; Steve Davis and Hurricane Higgins; Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett; hunger strikes; Red Ken and Fare’s Fair; ‘On your bike’; Lady Diana; ‘hog-whimpering drunk’; Chariots of Fire; Beefy Botham; ‘The lady’s not for turning’; the Peterborough Effect; Spectrum computers; ‘Gotcha!’; ‘We are not Britain. We are the BBC.’ Councillor Jeremy Corbyn.

Merely to repeat these names and phrases, all drawn from this, the fifth in Dominic Sandbrook’s great chronicle of Britain since the 1950s, is to re-enter the period. It encompasses the first three years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership up to and including her victory in the Falklands (which brought us the new word ‘yomp’). Indeed, for those who remember that time, it would make sense just to turn this review into one long list of the many phenomena Sandbrook deploys. It all comes flooding back.

Younger — i.e. most — readers, however, need things explained a bit. They will wish to be assured that, despite strong evidence to the contrary, Lymeswold was a cheese. They may find it hard to believe that a national newspaper (the Times) could have shut down for nearly a year because the unions resisted new technology or that, from August to October 1979, roughly half of British television (the ITV network) did not broadcast at all because the technicians’ union rejected a pay rise of 15 per cent. They may puzzle over the fact that the young Sheffield council leader, David Blunkett, recruited two officials to ‘describe to potential [council-house] buyers the disadvantages of home ownership’.