Ivey Stevens had been looking forward to the 13th of July for weeks. She and her husband

had planned their big night out long in advance, and as it approached it was hard not to be

excited. It had been a dreadfully muggy, oppressive day, with temperatures heading well

into the 90s, and Manhattan's crowded streets swelled with noise and sweat and heat. It

was still dreadfully hot and humid that evening, and it was a relief, therefore, for Ivey to

walk into the air-conditioned light and coolness of the World Trade Centre. It's gleaming

towers still only a few years old, and ride the elevator what 107 floors up to windows

on the world, the elegant restaurant that looked out across the city. And of course the evening

was every bit as exceptional and memorable as she had hoped. From her table, she could

see the whole of the city laid out beneath her, a patterned blanket of blinking lights

beneath a darkening sky. It was amazing, she said later. We were looking out at the most

spectacular view in the world. New York at night, when suddenly it disappeared. Now that

Dominic Sandbrook was written by a top historian of 1970s America, in his magnum opus, Mad

as Hell, and that author, I think, was commissioned to write 140,000 words, and he ended up writing

500,000 words. So, hundreds of thousands of words had to be cut.

Shaming, that's a shaming moment. And that was your self. But these chapters on 70s

America that had to be cut are all so good. So never let anything go to waste, Dominic.

Listeners may remember the two episodes we did on the full of Saigon, which we kind of cannibalized

chapters that you'd had to cut. And today we are doing the same with a chapter on New York

in the 70s. And we're doing that because we're recording this episode as part of the tour that

we're doing of the United States. We did a show in Washington. And as part of that, we did an

episode on Martin Luther King's Great Speech. I have a dream, which was the previous episode that

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