White Heat

After Never Had It So Good I was, at first, a little disappointed by the second part of Dominic Sandbrook’s diptych, White Heat. The coverage of the fifties in the first volume had tended to be thematic, sometimes wandering quite widely in time. It was only towards the end, and primarily in the political chapters, that the work actually assumed a chronological structure. But the new volume, which takes the story on from 1964 to 1970 (it begins, as the first volume ended, with Harold Wilson’s first election victory, and ends with Edward Heath moving into 10 Downing Street) is all chronology. It is divided into sections, each of which covers roughly two years, and within each section there are, usually, two chapters on politics, one on popular culture (generally focussing on either the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, or sometimes both) and then one or more thematic and wider-ranging chapters that might be on fashion, on religion, on the I’m Backing Britain campaign, on Swinging London, on race relations. Initially this rather mechanistic structure seemed less immediately accessible and involving than the first volume, but by the end I was enjoying the second book every bit as much as the first.

Paradigm Shift

Nothing quite changes the way you view your place in the world like the discovery that events you remember, that seem current, are actually history, the stuff of research and archives and theories and uncertainty. This uncomfortable readjustment has been most vividly brought home to me by reading Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. It’s huge, superbly written and fascinating, and it covers the years between 1956 (when I turned four) and 1964 (when I was in my first year at Grammar School), and it’s written by someone who wasn’t born until ten years after the events he relates.