In your recent book on the 70s, When the Lights Went Out, you say that Peter York is an astute social critic. Your first choice is his book, Style Wars. He’s well-known as an observer of the 80s. What does he reveal about the previous decade?

Everyone associates him with the 80s and sees him as an apologist for its excesses. But that's not quite right. He started writing for GQ in the early 70s, which was when he made his name. What you get from Style Wars is the sense that the 70s was great fun for many people, especially in London. That was quite a surprise when I first read the book 20 years ago. The 70s was notorious for being a dismal period. And that’s certainly the view I had of it until my twenties. The idea that even in the 70s there were cool people in London architecture, fashion and pop music, all having the best time, was a revelation. As was the fact that people had lots of money, which again is not the traditional picture.

Once I started reading Style Wars, I realised there was something else going on. It wasn’t necessarily political. But it was a vibrant culture, full of visual energy. Many of the people York writes about had tons of disposable income. They weren’t all the old aristocracy.

York’s methodology is fascinating. What he did in the 70s was an English version of Tom Wolfe: this kind of zany, insider prose that takes everyday life seriously. But while he was clearly influenced by Wolfe’s work in the 60s, York’s writing is distinctly English in style.

We’ll return to the cultural relationship between England and the United States later. But what struck me about your discussion of York in your book is his focus on social fragmentation and paranoia. That brings us neatly to your second book, John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. How did the Cold-War anxieties it evokes echo the domestic agenda of the 70s?

I'm a little suspicious of the ‘dark gothic 70s’ view, as I call it. The received wisdom should be challenged. It was clearly a time of anxiety and paranoia. But that atmosphere always assumes exaggerated form in newspaper leaders and magazine articles, because people like gothic things. You can find them in any decade if you want to write a gothic book. Even in the 90s, not a particularly dark time. But I find the darkness in le Carré particularly interesting because it’s quite melancholic. It evokes a sadness about Britain and the establishment at that time. There’s a sense of the world closing in. He really captures that in the book.

The world of the intelligence services is one eternally fraught with reactionary fears of national decline. Is it possible, through the extremes of paranoia they represent, to read something valuable about its more pervasive presence?

There’s a clear sense that the opportunities for the British elite, broadly described, are narrowing in the 70s. A lot of its gothic atmosphere comes from the fact that if you were writing for a newspaper or the intelligence services, then the empire is no longer an arena in which you can operate. It was the first decade without that imperial scope and the possibilities afforded by the EEC were not yet apparent. These were bleak years for the elite.

For many people not part of it, opportunities opened up in terms of what they could buy, things they could do, sexual mores. Many were quite positive about the 70s so there was quite a distinction between the two groups. That doesn’t mean the elite’s pessimism should be discounted. It had a very powerful influence, making the gothic the dominant flavour of the media at the time, particularly in newspapers. Le Carré really gets the sadness of that. But I like the way his spies are also quite cynical about the political right. They would probably side with the right but they are not stereotypical, Wilson-bashing spooks. They are a little more nuanced.

Indeed, in your assessment of the 70s, as well as the reds-under-the-bed fears there are also subversive elements from the political right of equal concern. Are they associated with the intelligence services?

Yes, to a degree. Certainly, Wilson was undermined by people in the intelligence services, as has now been documented in the official history of MI5. But bear in mind that it kept files on a huge number of people in the 70s – almost as many as the Stasi kept in the former East Germany. They had files on all kinds of trade-union activists, including Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman, and other centre-left figures. So there was certainly a sense in which the spooks were on the side of the right-wing fringe. Actually, most people I looked into who were active on that fringe weren’t closely connected with the intelligence services. They were people more associated with the fringes of the Tory party, anti-tax groups or ratepayer-rights organisations. Or they were libertarian students. Just as I think there’s too much gothic in our view of the 70s, there’s also too strong a sense of the ‘spooky 70s’. Much of the interesting politics on the right had nothing to do with the security services. But people’s attention is always drawn in that direction. I wouldn’t want to give them a monopoly of control over the fringe-right. 

Your third choice, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, deals in a comical way with domestic subversion and the education establishment – how the insurgents took over the asylum.