In the small hours of a summer night, the air was thick with war cries. “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn,” was being drunkenly and joyously belted out, to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes, by exuberant young people, in pubs, clubs, and city centers.

Uncanny, and unbidden, friends of a certain generation almost uniformly recall feeling as though they had abruptly been plunged back twenty years in time. The Corbyn celebrations recalled the optimism of D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better,” which accompanied New Labour’s sweeping electoral victory in 1997. As though something from the past, not yet properly worked through, has resurfaced for another attempt. This is, in a way that Richard Power Sayeed could not have anticipated, an ideal moment to revisit 1997.

1997 could, therefore, rest content at being the literary equivalent of clickbait, certain to tap into something truly resonant. It could simply blast its readers with a dizzying line up Oasis, the Spice Girls, Damien Hirst, Doreen Lawrence, Anna Friel, Blair, and Brown, and let memory do the work. But it is far, far better than that. It is the story of a complete political, cultural and economic situation — with one major, symptomatic absence, which I’ll come to. And it tells of the ways in which powerful groups, from New Labour to the art speculators to the BBC and the banks, all acted on the possibilities within it to shore up their own position.