A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65

Tales of a New Jerusalem #5

by David Kynaston

The early sixties in Britain told as only David Kynaston ('the most entertaining historian alive' Spectator ) can. Running from 1962 to 1965, A Northern Wind is the anticipated new volume in the landmark 'Tales of a New Jerusalem' series.

'Few historians have the power to make you feel you actually inhabit the times they are writing about. Kynaston does.' Sunday Times , Books of the Decade

How much can change in less than two and a half years? In the case of Britain in the Sixties, the answer almost everything. From the seismic coming of the Beatles to a sex scandal that rocked the Tory government to the arrival at No 10 of Harold Wilson, a prime minister utterly different from his Old Etonian predecessors.

A Northern Wind , the keenly anticipated next instalment of David Kynaston's acclaimed Tales of a New Jerusalem series, brings to vivid life the period between October 1962 and February 1965. Drawing upon an unparalleled array of diaries, newspapers and first-hand recollections, Kynaston's masterful storytelling refreshes familiar events – the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Big Freeze, the assassination of JFK, the funeral of Winston Churchill – while revealing in all their variety the experiences of the people living through this history.

Major themes complement the compelling an anti-Establishment mood epitomised by the BBC's controversial That Was The Week That Was ; a welfare state only slowly becoming more responsive to the individual needs of its users; and the rise of consumer culture, as Habitat arrived and shopping centres like Birmingham's Bull Ring proliferated. Multi-voiced, multi-dimensional and immersive, Tales of a New Jerusalem has transformed how we see and understand post-war Britain. A Northern Wind continues the journey.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Society

905 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 28, 2023

About the author

David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. He has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written eighteen books, including The City of London (1994-2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history, and W.G.'s Birthday Party, an account of the Gentleman vs. the Players at Lord's in July 1898. He is the author of Austerity Britain, 1945-51, the first title in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945-1979) under the collective title "Tales of a New Jerusalem".

Reviews

[Graham Power · Rating 5 out of 5]

Post-war Britain has been well-covered by historians in recent years but no one does it quite like David Kynaston. His books combine epic range with extraordinary detail. The panoramic sweep of a Kynaston sentence - collating events both momentous and mundane, sometimes undulating over a page and a half, and held together precariously by semi-colons - can be rather dizzying. He peppers his text with (or perhaps more accurately creates his text out of) extensive quotations from diarists (some famous but many not), contemporary interviews, memoirs and letters. This tapestry of voices brings the past to life with unusual vividness.

A Northern Wind is the fifth volume in Kynaston’s history of Britain from 1945 to 1979. It starts on Saturday 6th October 1962, the day after the release of the Beatles first single, and ends on Saturday 30th January 1965, the day of Winston Churchill’s funeral. So this doorstopper of a book covers just twenty-seven months. It was, though, an eventful period - the Profumo scandal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Great Train Robbery, the Big Freeze of 1963, Dr Beeching chopping up the railways and Doctor Who materialising for the first time - and one of accelerating change. 1963 was after all, at least according to Philip Larkin who makes frequent appearances in these pages, the year that sexual intercourse began. The Profumo scandal aside there’s not much sex here but lots of signs nonetheless that Britain was, albeit gingerly, starting to let its hair down: the rise of youth culture, the fresh energy of the Beatles and the Stones, increasing car ownership and the emergence of shopping as a leisure activity. The impression is of a culture transitioning from the communal to the individualistic. But not all the changes were for the better. Excessive slum clearance saw the widespread demolition of Victorian terraces and their working-class inhabitants transplanted to soulless and dehumanising tower blocks; atomisation rather than individualism.

One of Kynaston’s great strengths is his acute sensitivity to the muddled and even contradictory nature of history: ‘Any moment in history is Janus-faced: simultaneously looking backwards and forwards’. His somewhat tentative conclusion (judicious tentativeness is one of the many things I admire about him) is that at this stage Britain was still mainly looking backwards ‘despite the siren call of modernity from politicians, town planners, architects and others’. Borrowing a resonant phrase from Richard Hoggart he notes how ‘old habits persist’.

He certainly offers plenty of evidence that Britain in the early to mid-sixties remained a fundamentally conservative and hierarchical society characterised by deference, inequality, widespread poverty and strong class divisions. It was also a society in which racism, sexism and homophobia were endemic. In a quiet and entirely unshowy way Kynaston explodes a lot of myths. For instance, despite moral panic about mods and rockers causing havoc at the seaside, sociological surveys carried out at the time revealed that most teenagers wanted little more than a steady job and to get married and settle down; so much for ‘youthquake’. This might have been the golden age of the radical and challenging TV play but audience research showed that the majority of viewers disliked these plays, preferring more traditional fare such as Dixon of Dock Green and Dr Finlay’s Casebook. The satirical TV programme That Was The Week That Was, first aired in November 1962 and cancelled by the BBC just over a year later, has been both praised and blamed for contributing towards a liberalising mood and even bringing about the death of deference. It was certainly popular (around eight million viewers at its height) but, rather tellingly, nowhere near as popular as the egregious Black and White Minstrel Show (sixteen and a half million regular viewers). Canvassing for the Labour Party during the 1964 general election the young Tariq Ali was shocked by the deferential respect and support shown by many older working-class voters towards the leader of the Conservative Party, the aristocratic old Etonian Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Labour, led by the modernising, grammar school educated Yorkshireman Harold Wilson, won the election after thirteen years of Tory rule; but only just, scraping past the winning post with a measly overall majority of four, despite a widespread feeling that the Conservatives were out of touch and out of steam.

This is a magnificent book: densely packed and immersive history which conveys the bewildering diversity of daily life. Kynaston’s nuanced analysis rejects the familiar superficial and nostalgic cliches in favour of a more complex, and in many ways darker, portrait of sixties Britain. Above all he captures what it felt like for ordinary people to live through this particular stretch of time; grand events viewed from a quotidian perspective.

[History Today]

Since the 1990s three historians have entered the race to document as thickly as possible the postwar history of Britain. Peter Hennessy was the first starter, in 1992, but distracted by other concerns soon fell off the pace, managing to reach the early 1960s in three volumes. Dominic Sandbrook entered next, in 2005, cheating a little by starting at 1956, and has since yomped through the decades, producing five volumes taking us up to 1982. But perhaps slow and steady wins the race. David Kynaston started last, in 2007, and has only just reached 1965 in five volumes (six if you count his lockdown book, dwelling on 1962, On the Cusp). Unlike Sandbrook, he does not rely overmuch on newspapers – not really ‘the first draft of history’, only the first draft of what journalists think is history, chiefly politics – and where he does he plunges deep into the local press. Kynaston’s trump cards are diaries – dozens of them, able to reach down into mundane thoughts and diurnal lives. To them he adds lashings of television, cinema, novels, brisk summaries of academic literature, memoirs, social surveys and now his own memories: in 1962 he entered secondary school.

As a result his account is much more textured and alive than his rivals’. By 1962 he can use television as a click-track for the age, as every day his protagonists are watching soaps (Crossroads arriving alongside Coronation Street), Westerns, football and cricket, proliferating pop programmes (Ready Steady Go and Top of the Pops), The Wednesday Play for the more ‘advanced’, The Black and White Minstrel Show for the less. Some familiar themes thread their way through the narrative – Beatlemania, the Profumo affair, the rise and fall of That Was The Week That Was. Expected characters naturally rear their heads: the Pill, the Post Office Tower, mods and rockers. Some are, perhaps, unexpected, at least this early: David Bowie (still David Jones), the hairdressers Toni and Guy, Gyles Brandreth (from his teenage diary). Others benefit from hindsight: a beady eye is kept on the antics of Jimmy Savile; racism is on the rise, though not uncontested, unlike sexism, which contemporaries hardly notice, though Kynaston does. A few are still on stage today: David Hockney, Ken Loach, David Attenborough, John Cleese.

How to make all this hang together? What, to paraphrase Orwell, do the clatter of the Rolls Razor twin-tub washing machines, the to-and-fro of the young men in their Minis on the motorway, the queues outside the Rolling Stones concert, the rattle of counters in the bingo hall and the teenage girls cycling to grammar school in their uniforms possibly have in common? In earlier volumes – as early as the mid-1950s – Kynaston used ‘modernity’ as an organising principle, sure that ‘the British’ wanted it, albeit in familiar settings; but in 1962 they were still ‘on the cusp’ and now he is not so sure.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Peter Mandler teaches modern British history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. His latest book is The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2020).

[David Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

A meticulously and painstakingly collected history, let down by being all over the place in terms of its content. Massively significant events in history are side-lined to a few extracts from various diaries, with stories about the Beatles rubbing shoulders with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Moors Murders... but then, suddenly - grindingly long and dry chapters on topics such as the rise of town planning and supermarkets, or the state of hospitals provide in-depth analysis, so detailed and tedious in their never-ending analysis that they were almost like books in their own right.

...And then, without even a change of gears, we're suddenly talking about Crossroads and the Rolling Stones, Z-Cars and the Profumo Scandal, or Ronnie Biggs and the Vauxhall Viva, as subjects pass by in a day-by-day flash.

I would say this is probably the most comprehensive history of the period I've encountered, but nowhere near as coherent as books by Dominic Sandbrook or Andy Beckett.

[Keen Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars!

I remember reading one of Kynaston's post-war nostalgia-fests just over ten years ago and being mildly interested in it, but a bit deflated and disappointed (I believe I was convinced by an enthusiastic Nick Hornby review).

So I gave this rather meaty tome a shot and well I suppose I can see its appeal if you have lived through the period and had a working memory of the events that are written about and I tend to have an interest in this sort of social/political history, but I have to say this didn't really do too much for me.

I find it quite puzzling as I'm not quite sure the point of it?...Its written in a bland, detached way and to me it just felt like a long and breathless list of things which happened during the period, but without any analysis or comment on their impact or place within the greater scheme and so just felt a bit cheap, shallow and unsatisfying.

[Helen Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit of a commitment, around 600 pages of social and political history. It was a slow read, I did read it in three parts and read novels and listened to audio books in-between.
Having said that, I found it a fascinating read. Based on letters and diaries of politicians, celebrities and men and women living in the years 1962 to 1965. Their comments range from the Profumo Affair, Kennedy's assassination to the latest episode of Coronation Street. The reader hears the voices across the spectrum on people and events in the public eye.
Mods and Rockers, Beatlemania, Play for Today, and Mary Whitehouse are all in the news.
I was a child in the early 1960s, and this book puts into context the people and events whose names were familiar but which I really didn't understand. There were lots of ' oh I had forgotten them/ it' moments.
This large, highly detailed book may be an undertaking, but it is definitely worth the effort.

[Andrew F · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Kynaston's series of books about post-war Britain continues at a high standard. He has created a winning formula and delivers with it each time. Highly recommended.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not the first book I’ve read by this author and my interest in social history is pretty broad, Sandbrook, Hennessy et al, but I found this book dry read.

The historical detail is first rate and the topics are of interest but the book doesn’t get going and the author noticeably steps back from any summarisations. I can’t help but think that the book would have benefitted from some serious editing and topics could have been ‘chapterized’ together to smooth out the dialogue.

Nevertheless there were some little gems of historical record amongst the trivia and enough facts for me to continue and complete the book.

A balanced book politically but the endemic right wing/ imperialist tone did seep in on certain topics, which dates the cultural significance of some of the content.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fifth in a series of social histories of post-war Britain, which include:
• Austerity Britain 1945-51
• Family Britain 1951-57
• Modernity Britain 1957-63
• And, On the Cusp: Days of ‘62

This latest volume, A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65 is well-named. As in, On the Cusp, this reflects the sudden appearance of the Beatles on the musical and social scene. A Northern Wind which blew change into the Sixties with Merseybeat in the ascendance by 1963, although on the wane by the mid-Sixties. Only the Beatles would survive, to remain dominant, despite the fantastic music which followed on their heels.

As with David Kynaston’s earlier volumes, this book examines Britain from different aspects – political, societal and cultural. We begin with the Cuban Missile Crisis, discussion of the Common Market and the North-South divide. Europe, as always, has been a contentious issue and Britain has spent most of the post-war period obsessing about it. Also, at coming up to twenty years after the end of the war, the country was concerned about the role of the welfare state, questioning grammar schools and re-building. Kynaston spends much of his books discussing architecture and here we see new shopping centres pushing aside independent shops, ring roads and the continual rise of high-rise flats, despite people continually saying they would prefer to live in houses. Other changes include launderettes and a new television channel with BBC2.

Regarding people, we hear about, or from, Sylvia Plath, the assassination of John F Kennedy, Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler, Jeremy Thorpe, Philip Larkin, Kenneth Williams, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and many others. Cliff Richard struggled against the onslaught of the Beatles, there is a general election and is a little ungracious in his assessment of the musical changes. The Krays are mentioned briefly, Mary Whitehouse is campaigning and there are riots in seaside towns. Disturbingly, we read of the disappearance of children, which we later know are due to the Moors Murders.

This was a society of traditional gender roles, of strikes and discontent, when only a small minority went to university and when women were expected to give up their education or careers if they married or had children. Trade union support was declining and many in Britain were questioning the changes after the war. Immigration was a hot topic in the General Election which saw Harold Wilson, and Labour, win with the smallest of majorities. The Profumo Affair shook Britain’s trust in politicians, while great leisure time and the growing disposable income of teenagers, saw them influencing television and music. Radio was changing too, with Radio Caroline trying to break the control of major record labels. Irish businessman, Ronan O’Rahilly, started the pirate station after failing to get radio play for Georgie Fame, while BBC radio moved away from children’s shows, such as Listen with Mother, as children moved in greater numbers to watching television.

So much change, but so much more to come, as Britain heads towards the later part of the Sixties. If people were shocked by the length of the Beatles hair in 1963, you can only imagine how they felt by 1969. Meanwhile, the last chapter sees Churchill dying and a sense that the older generation felt the loss more acutely than the young and that Britain mourned publicly in the way that the country sometimes will. Some felt they were burying part of their history and self-identity with the leader of those war years, which so many had lived through. However, the war generation will soon give way to the influence of the young and a country that is moving into the modern world. I look forward to continuing this series of books, which are both informative and interesting to read.

[Ginni · Rating 5 out of 5]

This series of books look daunting, and this one is no exception, a chunky volume coming in at just under 600 pages. However, just like the previous books in the series, I found this compelling reading. I think it’s the mixture of politics, world news (as it affects the U.K.), popular culture and private diaries.
For me, this volume had added relevance; like the author, I started secondary education in 1962. As a result, many of the names and events resonate, although as a teenager, I largely ignored the political and economic events of the time. Also, the first four years or so of my secondary school life were at a convent boarding school, with no access to newspapers or TV.....the terror of the Cuban missile crisis, which begins this volume, was largely hidden from us, as were the more salacious details of the Profumo scandal.
I do remember exactly where I was when the news of Kennedy’s assassination came through (rehearsal for a school play), and we were all required to watch Churchill’s funeral - on the headmistress’s TV, in her private sitting room - a privilege hitherto reserved for the Wimbledon tennis tournament....
And of course the rise of the Beatles and the Mersey sound, together with the Stones, Kinks etc - this was probably what was occupying my mind most at this point, together with clothes and boys....not my ‘O’ levels, sadly.
I had to concentrate hard on some of the political and economic sections, but found the short biographies of the 10 most powerful Trades Union leaders in chapter 17 ‘A tremendous ferment at the lower levels’ fascinating. And the end of 13 years of Tory government? Coming this year, 2024, strangely prescient - maybe.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well written, thoroughly researched history that does really give a flavour of that fabled decade, Sixties Britain. Reading it I was struck by how little has changed on big picture issues - in the Sixties people were fretting about immigration, the cost of living, the Cold War, Labour versus Conservative, politicians being caught in lies of their own making and so on. But they had a vibrant popular culture too, and television was catching on in a way that the internet has done in Britain over the last ten years. So many parallels, although there's no contest in comparing Oasis with The Beatles and The Stones. Or Bob Dylan versus Taylor Swift. There was still a big focus on class distinctions, but has much really changed when Keir Starmer aims at imposing VAT on private schools? There's no doubt we're now a much more affluent society, but the plants being watered with our tax money today were sown in the Sixties, the expansion of the NHS, education, the welfare state, the state pension, the civil service. The impression is given that this was a more optimistic and ambitious decade for many Brits, and there was a sense that things were going to get better. I'm not sure I can say the same for today.

[DC Merryweather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvellous, profound account of a time when a shell-shocked nation, with great struggle, began to free itself from the sombre embrace of post-war austerity.

The edifice of the country's establishment was fracturing and parts sloughing away as reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Profumo affair, That Was the Week That Was, the Kennedy assassination and the first screams of Beatlemania echoed across the timeworn tiles of Coronation Street's rooftops. As these moments unfolded, they were not only etched in the annals of history but captured in private diaries, whose words weave a tapestry of insight from the perspectives of both ordinary and notable - and soon to be notable - figures, at a time when voices from outside of the RP BBC were beginning to be heard.

From slum clearances to shopping centres, Ready Steady Go to Doctor Who, Plath to Pinter, Moors Murderers to Mary Whitehouse, Macmillan's resignation to Churchill's funeral - reading this book with its storm of political, social, and cultural developments you get a real feeling of the country's tectonic plates shifting and the modern world forming.

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another brilliant social history from this author weaving together the day by day accounts from contemporary diarists. plays, TV shows, books, crimes and the events of the period which include the Cuban missile crisis; the rise of the Beatles, the Profumo Affair, the Cold winter; the Death of Churchill; the 1960s immigation debate; the gradual shift to Labour in the period leading up to the 1964 general election. The diaries cross the bridge between contempoary perpectives on public events and the individual personal lives of the multiple observers.

Also covers developments in social services; trade unitonism; State versus comprehensive education debates; Dr Beeching's axing of railway lines; modernism in town planning and skyscrapers. The beginnings of the consumer movement; Mods and Rockers. Sorry this review coming out too much a list of disparate things but that in part is the interesting, compound mosaic and contradictory nature of this account that glistens like a jewel but in some ways coheres. I will stop now.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's taken me a long time to read this, however, this book provides a fascinating and very balanced account of a pivotal period (aren't they all !) of British post war history covering Profumo, the rise of the Beatles and 60's culture, death of Kennedy, Dr Beeching the election of Wilson and finally the death of Churchill. End of an era ? In the background are the building issues of immigration and racism (particularly illustrated by the events in Smethwick during the 64 election), industrial relations and union power, the state of the economy and what we do about Europe - who didn't want us. Presumably all downhill from here and setting things up for the events of the 1970's and the eventual emergence of Thatcherism, where David Kynaston's series will end. I now await with anticipation the publication of the next instalment.

[Laura Spira · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed David Kynaston's previous books, especially his history of the City of London, but found this one a little disappointing. The period covers part of my own teenage years so I remember many of the people and events. He deals with the politics of the time in a very readable way but I expected to read more about the significant cultural shifts in theatre, cinema and fashion. My friends and I were much preoccupied with the threat of nuclear disaster and the activities of CND (our history teacher was arrested for participating in a sit-down protest) but Kynaston's diarists don't seem to have been very interested in that - even the teenage ones, notably Gyles Brandreth and Laurence Marks who both achieved subsequent fame. Still, I look forward to the next volume..

[David Twine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last volume in Kynaston's fascinating history of Britain since 1945. His method is rooted in the lives people lived, seen in diaries, newpaper articles, popular culture and in biographical recollections. His deep interest/understanding of social, political and economic history, and his ability to use his vantage point from 60 years later, enables him to show the significance of specific events. For example, he explores in great detail the challenges facing the Labour Government following their victory in the 1964 General Election, and the reader is left in little doubt that a Labour Government will still be facing versions of these challenges if elected in 2024.

[Andrew Morrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much information and really interesting. The author tells the history of the time period largely through quotations from people's journals, or other very direct sources. Major events and issue are also analyzed in a more detached, higher level style. These segments give the book needed structure. The task of selecting and organizing this information was tremedous, and I think the author mostly succedes, but sometimes it's a bit of a firehose of information situation. I would have like slightly more interpretation as the narrative develops, but the author often leaves people's words to speak for themsevles.

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll echo what my friend Andrew said. The author has hit upon a winning formula and I will be happy to read each book in the series as it emerges. As good a history book of this period as you will find. And for those of us who remember it through our first televisions, radios, record collections and watching our towns transformed by planners, it is exactly as remembered.

Quite brilliant. Everyone born between 1950 and 1970 should have this by the bedside.

I’m now going to order the ones I haven’t yet read.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much in four years

A snapshot of history but the glory is in the detail. This is not just about major events but also about the minutiae. The death of Churchill, the Great Train Robbery, Profumo, the Beatles, Eric and Ernie, what we ate, what people felt, from the mighty to the person in the street. So much history, never boring, always entertaining, but most of all educating. This is a work of love, a celebration of the extraordinary and the ordinary. Strangely a lot of what happens chimes with today.

[Nicholas McMullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy reading as history periods I (almost) lived through. Kynaston's approach is not as fun as Dominic Sandbrook's more gossipy style but the use of contemporary diaries is effective if a touch Pooterish at times. It does give you a strong sense of the time and Kynaston provides usually well balanced hindsight. One of main takeaways is anti nostalgia. The poor were poorer, public services less widespread, housing pretty dreadful etc. Three channels of mostly dreary tv.
Not sure I have stamina for more of Kynaston. Probably go back to Sandbrook.

[Moirad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. The series has now reached my early teenage years, and I was present at at least 4 of the events featured in this utterly comprehensive account of the early to mid 60s. The anecdotes balanced by the analysis, the public figures balanced by "ordinary" people, the range of topics covered, all achieved with writing that is so accessible and intelligent. I am already looking forward to the next volume.

[Stephen King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first that I’ve read of David Kynaston’s history of postwar Britain and it didn’t disappoints. Kynaston interweaves diary excerpts from a range of ‘ordinary’ people across the country with political and historical analysis in a completely immersive way. Although touching 600 pages with long economic sections and analysis of contemporary trade union figures, it is wonderfully written and deeply evocative of the times.

[Gareth Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s an interesting contrast between David Kynaston’s presentation of postwar British history and that of Dominic Sandbrook. Sandbrook presents thematic chapters whilst Kynaston a chronological miscellany. Both series are excellent. Sandbrook’s histories are the easiest to use as a reference source, but Kynaston’s series is, once you have got your eye in, a more enjoyable general read.

[Peter Kilburn · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with all the previous volumes in Kynastons Tales of a New Jerusalem this is a thoroughly researched history and because of the frequent reference to private diaries it has a real sense of immediacy. This volume covers the period from 1962 to 1965 and relates to my last few years at school. Some of the topics were familiar but I knew less of others. Looking forward to the next volume

[Ms E C FRANCKE · Rating 5 out of 5]

listen to Britain!

This is my first intro to Kynaston- and it has been the most riveting read. He is an extraordinary historian - weaving a multitude of voices together to understand the texture of the early 1960s - and the tracing the threads that feed into now!

[Dave Parr · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful history of the swinging sixties

[Graham Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant!

[Ann Baxter · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, excellent book from the best social historian around . Really bought back some memories & eagerly await his next book

[Stuart Harland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic insight into life in the early 1960’s. I’ve loved the whole series so far. Can’t wait for the next instalment.

[Clare Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read the whole series of these so far and love the forensic style in which he combines the personal and political to depict a rapidly changing world
Not an easy read but great

[Phil Butcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another enthralling book in this postwar history series. I love that its wide ranging scope takes in everything from popular culture to politics, from everyday life to urban planning. 4/5