Dominic Sandbrook > Quotes

“It was not Mrs Thatcher who made it possible for groups like Wham! to become rich and famous. If anything, the reverse was true. It was groups like Wham! – or more accurately their forerunners in the 1960s and 1970s, with all their talk of fighting the system, standing up to the Establishment, being who you wanted to be and living your life on your own terms – who opened the door for Mrs Thatcher. By undermining the institutions that had dominated British life for decades, by emphasizing the importance of self-gratification and by celebrating the value of the individual, Lennon and his contemporaries made it much easier for younger voters, in particular, to embrace her free-market message.”
― Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination

“number later put it, ‘quids in’. ‘I was getting taxis about,’ he recalled. ‘I mean, a pound would buy you a bloody good night out. You could probably have eight or nine pints of beer and twenty fags and a couple of tanners for the juke box.”
― Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles

“Such was the impact of the new medium that by 1967 nine in ten households had a television set. The only homes without one were those suffering from either ‘extreme deprivation or self-conscious intellectualism’.16 In”
― Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties

“the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours’.7”
― Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles

“As for the future, the Mirror was not optimistic. ‘If the 1980s are as awful as they predict,’ it thought, ‘the only people working at the end of them will be the experts forecasting unemployment for everyone else.”
― Dominic Sandbrook, Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982

“Afterwards, when they went around the table discussing the government’s ‘achievements’, Clark’s answer was ‘that we have really succeeded in putting a lot of people out of work’. There was grim laughter at that, but he was absolutely serious. The unions, he thought, had been ‘disciplined by the fear of being put on the dole and this is a considerable, though brutal, achievement’. But apart from that, he could think of nothing else.”
― Dominic Sandbrook, Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982

“mawkishness and”
― Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination