Author Description

In his foreword, David Willetts says: 'This is a wonderful collection of personal memoirs of a group of students at the LSE in the 1970s – and shows how that intense experience has shaped adult careers. There are vivid accounts of the journey from a working class background and the other journey, closely related, to London, a city most of them hardly knew. It is also a celebration of lasting (mostly male) friendships forged at university. As the LSE is at the heart of the story it makes sense also to treat these essays as a case study in social science. They may not be the sophisticated quantitative analysis which LSE graduates produce now. But they are vivid accounts of experience – qualitative social science – with the LSE itself as the subject matter. And even just a few personal accounts provide significant evidence of what education was like then and what the reality of social mobility can feel like.'<br/>These are the stories of 14 young people who became friends at the LSE in 1976 and had their lives re-shaped by the experience.