Before the Oil Ran Out

"Jack is a brilliant writer. This is a collection of essays written over a roughly 10 year period for The Sunday Times . They give you a sense, right from the frontline, of how Britain was changing in the eighties under Thatcherism. He specifically brings out the crucial consequences of deindustrialisation in the early eighties. In the space of about two years, we lost nearly a quarter of our manufacturing capacity. In places like Sheffield, which used to be “steel city”, by the mid-eighties it was an utterly different place with high unemployment. Precisely. Jack’s essays are now part of history. They show you it happening and the immediate consequences of it. He travels around England and Scotland, and touches on lots of different parts of society. He writes a kind of travel piece about the Cotswolds in the prosperous eighties, as well as talking to people in towns like Sheffield. There is one other thing that this collection has, and this is what raises it from just being very good to being touched with greatness. That is the first piece in the collection. It is 50-odd pages long, called “Finished with Engines” – a semi-autobiographical piece essentially about his father, who was a Scottish skilled working man. Through him he recreates a whole banished working class world. I have read it several times and each time I read it I think it is as good as Orwell. Ian Jack still writes every Saturday in The Guardian ."