Search results for ""Author Andy McSmith""
The New Press Fear And The Muse Kept Watch
Journalist Any McSmith brings together the stories of artists who worked at great risk during Stalinist Russia, one of the most oppressive regimes in world history.
£19.99
Little, Brown Book Group No Such Thing as Society: A History of Britain in the 1980s
The 1980s was the revolutionary decade of the twentieth century. To look back in 1990 at the Britain of ten years earlier was to look into another country. The changes were not superficial, like the revolution in fashion and music that enlivened the 1960s; nor were they quite as unsettling and joyless as the troubles of the 1970s. And yet they were irreversible. By the end of the decade, society as a whole was wealthier, money was easier to borrow, there was less social upheaval, less uncertainty about the future. Perhaps the greatest transformation of the decade was that by 1990, the British lived in a new ideological universe where the defining conflict of the twentieth century, between capitalism and socialism, was over. Thatcherism took the politics out of politics and created vast differences between rich and poor, but no expectation that the existence of such gross inequalities was a problem that society or government could solve - because as Mrs Thatcher said, 'There is no such thing as society ... people must look to themselves first.'From the Falklands war and the miners' strike to Bobby Sands and the Guildford Four, from Diana and the New Romantics to Live Aid and the 'big bang', from the Rubik's cube to the ZX Spectrum, McSmith's brilliant narrative account uncovers the truth behind the decade that changed Britain forever.
£10.99
Biteback Publishing Strange People I Have Known: ... And Other Stories
Westminster and Whitehall are secret worlds, hidden to most. But working as a lobby journalist, former Labour Party staffer Andy McSmith has had exclusive access to our top politicians for decades. Here, he shares his personal encounters with the great and the good of the British political landscape, revealing what they are really like behind the scenes. With witty and perceptive flair, he describes encounters such as flying to Tokyo with Margaret Thatcher, the last Prime Minister who would walk fearlessly into a room full of journalists, unprotected by special advisers; dining with Sir Edward Heath, a man who knew how to hold a grudge, in his home in Salisbury; observing Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as new MPs, sharing a cramped office in Parliament and collaborating like brothers; and working with Boris Johnson back when he had an ambition to be something more than just a journalist. Filled with vivid portraits of those at the heart of British politics over the past forty years, Strange People I Have Known is a memoir of a life well lived and an insider's account of the inner workings of government.
£22.50
