Hold your boombox in the air for the 1980s... surely the most photogenic decade in history.
It was the decade 24-hour news was born and the Cold War died. The decade Diana became a princess, Prince Rogers Nelson became just Prince; greed got good (for a while) and poverty got worse. There was a Very Important war over an island somewhere near Argentina, and a pop concert to relieve a famine in Africa.
How could anyone forget Top Gun, The Smiths, Dallas, MTV, yuppies, powersuits, IBM and Rubik's Cubes? It was the decade Millenials were born, just as Mr. T pitied his first fool.
History has not forgotten Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev or Michael Jackson, either. Nor the AIDS crisis and the rampant, structural homophobia that it spawned.
A lot happened in the 1980s: a decade of massive social, political and cultural change the influence of which has dripped through every decade since. And, as usual, there were plenty of writers itching to make sense of it all. Here are 20 of the most significant.