In the great revolutionary year of 1968, Tony Benn was a respectable Labour minister in his forties, and he was restless. While new social movements were shaking up Britain and much of the world, Westminster politics seemed stuck. It was time, he decided, for a different approach.

Over the next half century, the radicalized Benn helped forge a new left in Britain. He was joined by four other politicians, who would become comrades, collaborators and rivals: Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn.

For Andy Beckett, the story of these admired and loathed political explorers - both their sudden breakthroughs and long stretches in the wilderness - is the untold story of British politics in modern times. As he reveals, their project to create a radically more equal, liberal and democratic Britain has been much more influential than electoral history might suggest, and can be seen from the shape of our city life to the causes of our culture wars.

For their many detractors, this influence was and remains dangerous: a form of extremism that must be stamped out. But as these five searchers believed, in politics there is no total victory - nor total defeat.

The seventies encompass strikes that brought down governments, shock general election results, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the fall of Edward Heath, the IMF crisis, the Winter of Discontent and the three-day week. When the Lights Went Out goes in search of what really happened, what it felt like at the time, and where it was all leading. It includes vivid interviews with many of the leading participants, from Heath to Jack Jones to Arthur Scargill, and it travels from the once-famous factories where the great industrial confrontations took place to the suburbs where Thatcherism was created and to remote North Sea oil rigs. The book also unearths the stories of the forgotten political actors, from the Gay Liberation Front to the hippie anarchists of the free festival movement. This book is not an academic history but something for the general reader, bringing the decade back to life in all its drama and complexity.

In October 1998, General Augusto Pinochet, former dictator of Chile, was arrested in London. He had been charged with crimes against humanity by a Spanish magistrate, but over the 16 months that Pinochet was detained, equally intriguing questions went unanswered about his links with Britain. Why was Margaret Thatcher so keen to defend the General? Why was Tony Blair's usually cautious government prepared to have him arrested? And why was Britain the General's favourite foreign country? Andy Beckett offers a compound of history, investigation and travelogue that unravels this strange story.

A vivid, seminal portrait of early 1980s Britain: a period that changed Britain forever The early 1980s in Britain were a time of hope, and of dread: of Cold War tension and imminent conflict, when crowds in the street could mean an ecstatic national celebration or an inner-city riot. Here, Andy Beckett recreates an often misunderstood moment of transition, with all its potential and uncertainty: the first precarious years of Margaret Thatcher's government. By the end of 1982, the country was changing, leaving the kinder, more sluggish postwar Britain decisively behind, and becoming the country we have lived in ever since: assertive, commercially driven, outward-looking, often harsher than its neighbours.