Corrie and ready-salted crisps: the years when modern Britain began

In Burberry’s on Regent Street on a dank December day in 1959, David Kynaston records, ‘a young Canadian writer, Leonard Cohen […] bought a not-yet-famous blue raincoat’. For those joining Kynaston’s groaning historical wagon train for the first time, this is a sample of the sort of thing with which it abounds. Here is a fun little fact — gathered in from a distinctly marginal source — dropped in a wry half-sentence where it belongs chronologically, but looking forward to the future: a stitch in time.

A Shake of the Dice is the sixth book in Tales of a New Jerusalem, the great historian’s ‘projected sequence of books about Britain between 1945 and 1979’. He is chewing his way through the giant lettuce-leaf of his chosen decades like a particularly thorough tortoise. Hares: watch out.

Unlike most other popular historians, who favour the survey and the overflight, who take thematic bones and string facts and quotations onto them by way of illustration, Kynaston’s method is to build an enormous picture from the ground up by the patient and sometimes seemingly directionless (though only seemingly, and only sometimes — or perhaps only sometimes only seemingly) accumulation of detail.