State of Emergency: The Way We Were. Britain

From : The Economist
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Britain in the 1970s

Worst of times, best of times

Sep 23rd 2010

State of Emergency: The Way We Were. Britain, 1970–1974. By Dominic Sandbrook. Allen Lane; 768 pages; £30.

AS PRIME MINISTERS, Edward Heath and Gordon Brown had quite a lot in common. Both were monstrously self-centred, permanently grumpy and capable of astonishing rudeness. Both of their relatively short-lived premierships ended in humiliating failure. In a recent poll of academics on Britain’s best and worst prime ministers since the second world war, Heath came ninth out of twelve and Mr Brown tenth. But that is where the similarities end. Whereas Mr Brown was largely the author of his own misfortunes (the banking crash apart), Heath, as Dominic Sandbrook reminds us in his splendidly readable new history of Britain during the four years from 1970, was faced with a set of problems whose intracta
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