Status Updates From 1965 The Year Modern Britai...

Friends and foes alike are agreed that Roy Jenkins remains the most influential Home Secretary of the twentieth century and the chief political architect of the Britain we live in today. (Margaret Thatcher vies with Jenkins for ideological import, but she could not have risen as far as she did without the benefit of the reforms he introduced.)

Ever since the industrial revolution, Western culture had been split on what were essentially class lines. There was high art and there was popular culture, and it was as impossible to appreciate both as it was to hide your origins in declaring to which you gave your allegiance. The Beatle’s achievement was to lay waste to this tragic bifurcation,

a great auteur was possessed of such a unified vision of the world and everything in it that they were able, through force of personality and artistic focus, to be in sole creative charge of the set of sub-creators – actors, lighting crews, set designers etc – working for them. That the work of a great auteur could, like the work of a great novelist or painter, become the expression of a single spirit.

that year’s Bond movie, Thunderball, was the first entry in the series to function solely as a technoporn fantasy. Unlike its predecessors, this was a film that had no purchase, however distant, on reality. One way or another, the first three Bond pictures, Dr No, Goldfinger and especially From Russia With Love, had been able to claim some relationship to the goings on of the real world.

Heath wasn’t, as is often suggested, the first non-aristocrat to lead the party. But as an ex-grammar-school boy he was certainly the first man of lower-middle-class origins to head the party of nobility. Nor was he the last. For fully forty years after Heath’s accession, the Conservatives were led by men – and a woman – with backgrounds which would have been unthinkable to earlier versions of the party

economic logistics underlay the form of Dylan’s early work. Like an artist who makes his name with charcoal drawings because he can’t afford to experiment with oils, Dylan had become a folk singer because folk songs were cheaper to perform than rock and roll songs. The folk tradition of one man and his guitar meant that you could put on a show with the minimum of assistance. ‘It was easy,’ Dylan explained