Hello, my name is David Runsman and this is Talking Politics. Today it's the first of our

Talking Politics Guides and it's Helen Thompson, our resident expert on international

finance, on generational politics and on history, talking about the 1970s.

These Talking Politics Guides are brought to you as ever in partnership with the London

Review of Books, who's summer sale with the Paris Review, two subscriptions for one

low price, is open to Talking Politics listeners. Head to lrb.co.uk forward slash guides for

more information, along with the usual lists of further readings from the lrb archive.

There is something fairly arbitrary about doing politics decade by decade, so I assume

you don't think the 1970s in political terms started on January the 1st, 1970, when did

they start?

That's a pretty hard question, I'm going to say, because you could argue I think that

they may be started in the 60s. Some people might say 1968, because that's the point

I think in which the pressures in American politics reach a point that culminate in Johnson

saying he's going to run for the presidency again, the beginnings of the Nixon presidency,

and January 1969, true, for the election of 68, and Nixon's presidency does shape, I think,

the 1970s, so that would be a contender. You could also argue then they start with one

of Nixon's actions, the end of dollar gold convertibility in the summer of 1971. There's

a nice symbolic point actually in 1970, which is when American Conventional Oil Production

peaks, so I think you can take your pick.

There are these points in the early history of the 70s that are known as the Shocks, the

Nixon Shocks, the All Shocks, and the word Shocks is often associated with the 1970s,

so were they Shocks?

...