Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982

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His portrayal of Mrs Thatcher is partisan to a fault. Opposition voices are dismissed as belonging to weirdos and faint hearts.Don't take my word for it, read it and see what you think. Chris Ryan was born in 1961 in a village near Newcastle. In 1984 he joined the SAS. During his ten years in the Regiment, he was involved in overt and covert operations and was also Sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team. Superb ... Like its predecessors, Who Dares Wins is a rich mixture of political narrative and social reportage. It is scholarly, accessible, well written, witty and incisive. It fizzes with character and anecdote. And it presents an unrivalled portrait of the age of Austin Metros, Sinclair home computers [and] Lymeswold cheese." Piers Brendon, Sunday Times

Who Dares Wins - Penguin Books UK

The period of transition was notable also for major disruptive reactions driven by the decimation of the traditional working class by industrial transformation. These changes were ephemeral rather than durable, albeit highly significant for many at the time. They included substantial protest marches by the newly unemployed, increasing racial tensions and riots in the inner cities, the reinvigoration of the CND anti nuclear campaigns, and Northern Ireland hunger strikes and related terrorist bombings. All Or Nothing: the explosive new action thriller from bestselling author and SAS: Who Dares Wins star (Alex Abbott) Softcover. Condition: Very good. VG softcover. First edition, first printing. Light signs of wear to exterior, binding solid and straight, interior clean and unmarked. Lightly read, but a very nice example. first edition ("First published in the United Kingdom in 2009", first printing (complete number line).

I should say straight away that I am a huge fan of Dominic Sandbrook, and feel that this is his finest book yet, although I recognise that that might simply reflect my greater familiarity with, and recollection of, the events about which he writes. Where he excels is in drawing together, without any semblance of artifice, so many different strands of life. He gives a detailed account of the political issues dominating day to day life, but also sheds light on prevailing trends in entertainment, literature and music, as well as changing aspects to domestic life. The book begins and ends with accounts of the British military in action. It opens with an account of the Iranian Embassy siege in London in 1980, something those of us alive at the time probably won't forget watching, open mouthed, on television. Both events suggest that Britain was not in irreversible decline at the end of the 1970s, and that its national self respect, battered by economic decline and policy paralysis, was reinvigorated by these two highly public examples of competence and leadership.

Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979-1982 - Goodreads

The transformation of Britain under these social developments seems driven more by structural change than a direct result of the election of Margaret Thatcher. Sandbrook notes that many changes superficially attributed to the Thatcher years were in fact well underway when Thatcher was first elected in 1979. This is certainly true of the Thatcher economic agenda.

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Chosen as a Book of the Year in The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the London Evening Standard, the Mail on Sunday, Prospect and BBC History Magazine In terms of discussing the politics, I find Sandbrook - in contrast to many other authors - to be quite brilliant. It can be extremely difficult to follow politics in one's own country, let alone another, and even though I have been reading THE ECONOMIST for a quarter century, I still struggle with mastering all of the names and all of the scandals and other ins and outs. But just as a good ensemble movie makes each character distinct, so too does Sandbrook really paint the characters so well that they can be distinguished from each other. (However, I also used Google Images to help me keep people distinct, as I need to match faces to names as I am awful with the latter). Or did it? The reality was more complicated, says Sandbrook. Even before the Argentinian invasion the Tories had been on an upswing, inflation was falling, business improving, and their approval rate was more than 30%. This contrasts with the opening sections of the book, which lay out the sorry state of Britain at the turn of the 80s – economic decline, unemployment, inflation, violence in Northern Ireland, strikes, riots, and a general sense that our days of being “Great” were long gone. The received wisdom is that Thatcher set about destroying British industry by hammering the unions, instituting cash controls – monetarism – and plunging the country into recession. But, as Sandbrook argues, coal, steel and car-making had been in steep decline for years, and the recession would have happened even under Labour. Similarly, the right to buy, the Tories’ controversial sale of council houses, predated Thatcher by at least a decade; her twist on the policy was to make it law. Mrs Thatcher enjoyed watching snooker, though leisure was not something she understood Life and leadership lessons from the Special Forces, from the stars of Channel 4 series Who Dares Wins - including Sunday Times bestselling author of FIRST LEADING FROM THE FRONT , Ant Middleton