The 1980s are back. In the latest series of The Crown, currently streaming on Netflix, there are the big shoulder pads, the double-breasted suits, the waxed jackets and pearls of the Sloane Rangers. Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize last week, shows a very different side of life in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain: set in Glasgow in the 1980s, it is unremittingly bleak, filled with alcoholism and childhood trauma. Even this winter lockdown can feel at moments as if it has transported the country back to the future — to a time when few people ate out at restaurants, few travelled by plane internationally and in which the home video recorder was the most exciting invention (eventually trumped by the computer, which in

Source: The Times November 23, 2020 00:00 UTC