Lucy Robinson – författare

Available in paperback for the first time, his book demonstrates how the personal became political in post-war Britain, and argues that attention to gay activism can help us to fundamentally rethink the nature of post-war politics. While the Left were fighting among themselves and the reformists were struggling with the limits of law reform, gay men started organising for themselves, first individually within existing organisations and later rejecting formal political structures altogether. Culture, performance and identity took over from economics and class struggle, as gay men worked to change the world through the politics of sexuality. Throughout the post-war years, the new cult of the teenager in the 1950s, CND and the counter-culture of the 1960s, gay liberation, feminism, the Punk movement and the miners' strike of 1984 all helped to build a politics of identity. There is an assumption among many of today's politicians that young people are apathetic and disengaged. This book argues that these politicians are looking in the wrong place. People now feel that they can impact the world through the way in which they live, shop, have sex and organise their private lives. Robinson shows that gay men and their politics have been central to this change in the post-war world.

This book brings together historians, sociologists and social scientists to examine aspects of youth culture. By so doing, Youth Culture and Social Change maps out new ways of historicizing responses to economic and social change: public unrest and popular culture.

Now that’s what I call a history of the 1980s tells the story of eighties Britain through its popular culture. Charting era-defining moments from Lady Diana’s legs and the miners’ strike to Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage and Adam and the Ants, Lucy Robinson weaves together an alternative history to the one we think we know. This is not a history of big geopolitical disasters, or a nostalgic romp through discos, shoulder pads and yuppie culture. Instead, the book explores a mashing together of different genres and fan bases in order to make sense of our recent past and give new insights into the decade that defined both globalisation and excess. Packed with archival and cultural research but written with verve and spark, the book offers as much to general readers as to scholars of this period, presenting a distinctive and definitive contemporary history of 1980s Britain, from pop to politics, to cold war cultures, censorship and sexuality.

Now that’s what I call a history of the 1980s tells the story of eighties Britain through its popular culture. Charting era-defining moments from Lady Diana’s legs and the miners’ strike to Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage and Adam and the Ants, Lucy Robinson weaves together an alternative history to the one we think we know. This is not a history of big geopolitical disasters, or a nostalgic romp through discos, shoulder pads and yuppie culture. Instead, the book explores a mashing together of different genres and fan bases in order to make sense of our recent past and give new insights into the decade that defined both globalisation and excess. Packed with archival and cultural research but written with verve and spark, the book offers as much to general readers as to scholars of this period, presenting a distinctive and definitive contemporary history of 1980s Britain, from pop to politics, to cold war cultures, censorship and sexuality.

This book assesses the legacy of Dick Hebdige and his work on subcultures in his seminal work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979).