The Swinging Sixties should be renamed the Seedy Sixties

You know you’re getting old not when the policemen start looking young, but when a public figure dies and you say ‘O, I thought they were dead already!’ So it was for me when I heard that the Australian writer Richard Neville had died of dementia at the age of seventy four last week. Neville was never any sort of hero of mine – I was too busy promising my soul to Satan for a quick lick of Marc Bolan. But when I was thirteen and at the peak of my shoplifting prowess, I nicked his book Play Power on exactly the same robbing rampage that saw me take proud possession of The Female Eunuch, the half-mad masterpiece of Neville’s contrary contemporary Germaine Greer. There was loads in Neville’s book about capitalism and what not that I didn’t understand. However, an unholy trinity of unwholesome features soon made Play Power my favourite posing pouchette; sex, swearing and skiving. These were basically my adolescent ambitions, and I couldn’t believe an actual adult was being paid (though not by me, with my wily light-fingered discount) to proselytize them.

As you can imagine, a political treatise which appeals to teenyboppers must be pretty damn silly.