Big newspaper headlines are greeting the arrival of two works, a novel and a BBC adaptation of a novel, which centre on the maelstrom of iniquity symbolised the 1980s in the United Kingdom.

One is an adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's "The Line of Beauty" which is at the more conventional "identity-politics" angle - at least conventional in terms of how issues are seen in the early years of the 21st century. The other, "The Dream of the Decade - The London Novels" by Afshin Rattansi takes a much more Dostoyevskian path, looking at the critical determinant of class rather than more fashionable identities such as race and gender.

Whereas in Hollinghurst, we see the world through the upper middle classes, Rattansi shows us the few newly rich and there wonderment at what they have gained and what they have lost. For it is the disparities of wealth that were created that are still stinging Britain today. There may now be rich gays and rich women but to be poor, being gay is no fun and to be a woman - the poorest are still women - all is not those who have bankrolled their fast cars via privatisation of taxpayers' assets, paid for by the post-war generations.

Interestingly, all the significant novels associated with the 1980s (in the U.S., those by Easton Ellis and McInerney, in the UK, Amis and Coe) fail when it comes to tramping through the financial drought-lands of Michigan or Louisiana let alone Peckham or Gateshead. It's that perspective and the authenticity of writing in Rattansi's four novels that create what the 1980s were about and how we are all living its brutal legacy. In four novels ("The Dream of the Decade" is, unfashionably, a quartet) rather than Hollinghurst's one he dissects love affairs gone awry, sure. But he shows how they go awry because of new laws and feelings about house prices, about property, about new fears of crime and unemployment and homelessness not seen since the thirties and yet now seen through the prisms of massively murderous campaigns in Latin America and yuppie City of London champagne and nightmarish U.S. army build ups. You get the whole picture from the threat of terror - campaigns in London were then much more fearsome - to the threats of environmental and bodily destruction.

Nevertheless, Hollinghurst and Rattansi seem to share a view that what happened in the 1980s was deeply important to how we and generations born since then are today. Interestingly, the London Daily Telegraph was horrified to hear that in the Hollinghurst adaptation, the BBC has cast Kika Markham, a member of the Left-wing Redgrave Dynasty and supporter of the Workers