Former military officers like General Walter Walker and Major Alexander Greenwood began to form private armies, thousands strong, to protect queen and country. ibid.
The plotters never got their coup. ibid.
[James] Angleton claimed he had given proof of Wilson’s treachery to the head of MI5, Roger Hollis. ibid.
Maybe you were falling in love with music or just falling in love ... Whatever you got up to in the 1970s it’s passed from rose-tinted memories into our shared national history. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s I: Get It On 70-72 ***** BBC 2013
Years of tremendous change shattering the cosy post-war consensus. ibid.
This was a blessed generation: we had work, we had welfare and we had wealth. ibid.
These were the Wimpy years, when brand-new estates and neat little houses blossomed on the suburban fringes of the nation's cities. ibid.
Gentrification – and inner city Britain would never be the same again. ibid.
Heath had been committed to the European ideal since his student days in the 1930s. ibid.
And the message was – can we join your gang please ... Passions for and against were running high. ibid.
An adventure abroad was now one of life’s pleasures. ibid.
Wine was becoming essential ... The average British wine intake doubled. ibid.
[Marc] Bolan himself seemed to be the ultimate pin-up. ibid.
A strange creature landed in central London – Ziggy Stardust ... The persona of the rock star David Bowie ... Bowie saw gender-bending as a kind of performance. ibid.
Britain’s most vividly attired man of the early 70s – Peter Wyngarde, better known as TV’s rakish adventurer Jason King. ibid.
The Gay Rights movement had hit the streets. ibid.
In the late summer of 1972 one group of British citizens were arriving from sunnier climbs ... Frightened Asian families from Uganda were seeking shelter in Britain. ibid.
Anti-immigration feelings were running high ... About 25,000 Asian Ugandans arrived in England. ibid.
They [miners] just wanted their fair share of Ted Heath’s brave new world. ibid.
In early 1972 they woke from their slumber and voted to strike for a better deal. ibid.
Power cuts were becoming a fact of life. ibid.
Ted Heath had fatally underestimated the miners ... Heath hadn’t just been beaten, he’d been annihilated ... The victory of aspiration. ibid.
The British economy was in desperate trouble. ibid.
In 1973 Princess Anne’s big day had it all: crowds, pageantry, a radiant young couple, and a happy family. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s II: Doomwatch 73-74
The oil crisis was the single decisive moment of the 1970s. It was the tipping point, the catalyst that changed everything. ibid.
The Middle East had erupted as Israel’s Arab neighbours launched a stunning surprise attack ... The Arab oil nations announced an eye-watering price rise of 70%. ibid.
For people on low incomes, inflation was a silent menace. ibid.
By 1973 the great plastic boom is on. ibid.
Britain was falling in love with mass consumerism. ibid.
Miners: it was a showdown that divided the nation ... The miners raised the stakes as their overtime ban became an all-out strike. ibid.
The ’70s sex comedy ... The Confessions of a Window Cleaner – the lowest point in British cinema history. ibid.
When Heath failed to do a deal with the Liberals, Labour’s Harold Wilson returned as a minority prime minister. ibid.
Nowhere in Britain was safe from the violence that had engulfed Northern Ireland. ibid.
The generation shaped by the sacrifice of the Second World War were looking on in horror as a new Britain erupted around them. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s III: Goodbye Great Britain 75-77
The Wheeltappers was prime-time Saturday night TV. ’70s’ Britain was a man’s world. ibid.
The [Brentford] Trico women went out on strike ... After twenty-one weeks with production lines at a standstill Trico gave in. ibid.
It was in the mid-’70s that the fight for equality really gained momentum. ibid.
Football: many young fans were carried away by a culture of casual violence. ibid.
Man U v Wolves: The Stratford Enders went on the rampage ... Fourteen people were stabbed ... They even ransacked the Wolves club shop. ibid.
Football violence had become a brutal nationwide epidemic. ibid.
British motors weren’t always easy to love ... The Rover SD1 was a national project. ibid.
In Survivors: 95% of the population had been wiped by a future pandemic – The Death. Survivors captured the pessimism and paranoia of mid-’70s Britain. ibid.
The £ had fallen below $2 ... The IMF sent six international bankers to look at Britain’s books. ibid.
Punk: in the vanguard the Sex Pistols ... Punks were assaulting Britain’s most cherished icons ... For the originals, punk was great fun. ibid.
We’d made a decisive break with the old post-war settlement. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s IV: The Winner Takes It All 77-79
The top rate of income tax went up to 83%. ibid.
At the age of just twenty-three Richard Branson had made himself a millionaire. ibid.
So why did these new estates deteriorate so badly so quickly? ibid.
The effects of commonwealth immigration seemed uncomfortable even alarming. ibid.
Margaret Thatcher was walking into Downing Street as Britain’s first woman prime minister. ibid.
The Day of Action was extended into weeks of action – dustmen, ambulance drivers, caretakers, bus drivers, road-gritters and many more began a series of rolling strikes that caused total chaos. ibid.
It’s easy to forget that for five of the last eight decades Britain was at war. It was a war that framed all our lives. Welcome to Cold War Britain. This was a war between us – the democratic capitalist West – and them – the communist totalitarian East. Dominic Sandbrook, Strange Days – Cold War Britain I: Red Dawn, BBC 2013
We lived every day in the shadow of Armageddon. ibid.
The defections of Burgess and Maclean came as a terrible shock. ibid.
The British bomb was all about our national virility. It was a kind of atomic Viagra. ibid.
For almost fifty years Britain stood on the brink of Armageddon. Dominic Sandbrook, Strange Days – Cold War Britain II
And yet the world might end at the touch of a button. ibid.
The Russians used the explicit images to blackmail John Vassall ... Vassall went down for eighteen years. ibid.
The Soviet Union went to war: sending tanks and troops thundering into their southern neighbour Afghanistan. Dominic Sandbrook, Strange Days – Cold War Britain III
This fantastic poster: She promised to follow him to the end of the Earth; he promised to organise it. ibid.
So we won. But what did we do with our victory? We unleashed the power of turbo-capitalism. ibid.
By 2012 much of our industrial base was gone ... But there is one thing I think that we do better than anyone else on the planet – popular culture. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You I: The New British Empire, BBC 2015
Rank [cinema] had discovered that on the cultural front Britishness, British history, was our greatest assets. ibid.
The Beatles were an immaculately packaged product. ibid.
The sixties only swung for a tiny minority. ibid.