Britain gets swinging

ALWYN TURNER investigates the latest volume in David Kynaston's epic history of modern Britain, as the author turns his attention to the heady days of the early 1960s

- ALWYN TURNER

David Kynaston’s history of Britain between 1945 and 1979, Tales of a New Jerusalem, reaches the 1960s in this, the latest volume of the series. The approach remains the same: an epic of the everyday, heaping up news stories, diary extracts, official reports, adverts, TV reviews and more to provide a kaleidoscopic, ever-moving snapshot of the nation. And like previous volumes, it’s hypnotically readable.

He’s mining a particularly rich seam this time, a slither of an era filled with moments that still resonate, from the Great Train Robbery and the Profumo scandal to James Bond movies, the satire boom, pirate radio and mods and rockers. Born in these years were television shows that became institutions – Doctor Who, Match of the Day, Top of the Pops – and shops that transformed the nation: Habitat, MFI, Oddbins, Topshop. Semi-mythical figures are glimpsed: Martin Luther King at St Paul’s Cathedral, Malcolm X at the Oxford Union, Mary Whitehouse on the moralising warpath.