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| On the march . . . in support of the miners, 1972. Photograph: PA Photo |
Andy Beckett on a volume of history that feels over-familiar
How do you write readable social history? Few historians have found a perfect answer. Do you focus narrowly and intensely, as Carlo Ginzburg did in his 1976 classic The Cheese and the Worms, which recreated an entire world from the persecution of a single 16th-century heretic; or do you try to cover every major event and trend in a given era, as David Kynaston has recently done in his bestselling books about Britain in the 40s and 50s? There are always trade-offs: between narrative pace and comprehensiveness, between being clear and panoramic and leaving room for texture, ambiguity, fresh thinking.
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