Sucking in the Seventies

Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this (UK) Times’ reassessment of the most maligned decade of recent years, the 1970s. A snippet: The full reassessment of the 1970s must, therefore, take into account two great truths. First, it was the age of transition from then to now. Battles were fought and won that made us who we are today. Some victories were benign - few now would argue against the liberation of gays and women, and environmentalism. Others were distinctly ambiguous - hyper-individualism has gone, everybody agrees, too far, though nobody knows how to restrain its excesses. Second, it was a period that produced a disproportionate share of the greatest art of the postwar period. Sam Tyler was right to leap off that building back into the era of Gene Hunt and Mark III Cortinas. It felt more alive. The 1970s had the [famously rotten car, the Austin] Allegro, but they weren’t "shit-brown". They were golden. Whole thing here . It’s well wo...