The 1970s is remembered as a decade of punk rock, the Winter of Discontent, Bloody Sunday and The Female Eunuch. The iconic images of the 70s, from the break-up of the Beatles to the striking Merseyside graveyard diggers and mountains of municipal rubbish in Leicester Square, provide a glimpse into the extraordinary contrasts of the decade. Britain in the 1970s has been painted as a country in crisis, but despite the strikes, power cuts, and stagflation, recent research has proclaimed that 1976 was the best time in Britain since 1950. The country underwent huge social and cultural shifts,...

Eighty years ago Ramsay MacDonald took office as the first British Labour Prime Minister, the placards announcing LENIN DEAD, RAMSAY MACDONALD PREMIER. The judgement of historians on this short-lived minority administration in 1924, dependant on Liberal parliamentary votes, has often been 'in office, but not in power'. The First Labour Government is the first major account for nearly fifty years to re-assess critically Labour's first period in office in terms of domestic, foreign and imperial policy. It draws on a wide range of private papers and official sources and reconstructs the history...