Rereading the novelist David Peace’s GB84, set during the Miners’ Strike, it recently struck me that when Peace wrote the novel, in 2004, he was writing from the middle of the “End of History” era. His portrayal of a country on edge, breaking apart under civil conflict, was a historicising one. Twenty years after the events it depicted, its jagged, paranoid tone was a literary construct, not a reflection of Peace’s lived reality under the New Labour consensus. Yet in today’s Brita...
