The new freedom

For me this book evokes a Gigi duet moment: ‘You wore a gown of gold.’ ‘I was all in blue.’ ‘Am I getting old?’ ‘Oh, no, not you.’ Memory plays us false, and it takes the skill of a sympathetic historian such as Virginia Nicholson to sift the evidence, written and oral, and unfold a story that is both plausible and sound.

I look back to my 1960s life and think how many of us were metaphorically clothed in gold… how we strode through the years enjoying new freedoms, new loves, music, clothes, drugs, opportunities. I have in my time contributed to the myth of unalloyed pleasure, extolling the 1960s for the quickening pace of change, the broadening mood of happiness and hope. But, as another lyricist has it, ‘it ain’t necessarily so’.

Nicholson meets the dilemma head on. There have been fine histories of the decade by David Kynaston, Dominic Sandbrook and Arthur Marwick: all of them footnoted, thorough… and male.