“England, 1997” reads the opening page of Matthew Finn’s new book, School of Art. On May 1 of that year, the left-leaning Labour Party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, won the general election. It was a landslide victory, one that, in numbers, has not since been topped, and it ended the party’s eighteen-year spell in opposition to the right-wing Conservative Party government. Infamously, in response Liam Gallagher, of the rock band Oasis, and his partner Patsy Kensit lay on crumpled Union Jack bedsheets in a photograph shot by Lorenzo Agius on the cover of Vanity Fair, under the headline “London Swings Again!”
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