Martin Adeney's generation was the last to be born while the British Empire still existed. They were 'twilight's children', and, like those generations that followed, shaped by its consequences. Born in the British Middle East as the Empire tottered, Adeney would go on to report on the grand events of the post-Imperial age, for The Guardian, as Industrial Correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, and then as the BBC's Industrial Editor. His career gave him a unique vantage point from which to observe the decline of the great industries and imperial trade cities; the retreat of the newspaper empires from the north to an almost exclusively metropolitan viewpoint; the rise and fall of the trades unions, which dominated politics from the end of the 1960s to the mid-1980s, and the rise of Thatcherism and big business. This compelling blend of memoir and narrative history describes how many of the issues that preoccupied us in the late '60s and early '70s - including immigration, housing, social provision, education, industry and communications - remain the daily currency of our political discourse.It shows how, for all the material prosperity we enjoy and for all our cultural self-confidence, we nonetheless nurture a lingering feeling of superiority alongside a perception that things were better in the past, when we, the British, were taken seriously.It is Adeney's contention that we are all still carrying the baggage of empire.