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.