Modernity Britain: 1957-1962

Description

The late 1950s and early 1960s was a period in its own right-neither the stultifying early to midfifties nor the liberating mid- to late-sixties-and an action-packed, dramatic time in which the contours of modern Britain started to take shape. These were the "never had it so good" years, in which mass affluence began to change, fundamentally, the tastes and even the character of the working class; when films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and TV soaps like Coronation Street and Z Cars at last brought that class to the center of the national frame; when Britain gave up its empire; when economic decline relative to France and Germany became the staple of political discourse; when "youth" emerged as a fully fledged cultural force; when the Notting Hill riots made race and immigration an inescapable reality; when a new breed of meritocrats came through; and when the Lady Chatterley trial, followed by the Profumo scandal, at last signaled the end of Victorian morality. David Kynaston argues that a deep and irresistible modernity zeitgeist was at work, in these and many other ways, and he reveals as never before how that spirit of the age unfolded, with consequences that still affect us today.

David Kynaston has been a professional historian since 1973 and has written fifteen books, including The City of London (1994-2001), a widely acclaimed four-volume history. He is the author of Austerity Britain, 1945-1951, and Family Britain, 1951-1957, the first two titles in a series of books covering the history of post-war Britain (1945-1979) under the collective title Tales of a New Jerusalem. He is currently a visiting professor at Kingston University. He lives in England.

Kynaston continues his history of postwar Britain (after Austerity Britain: 1945-1951 and Family Britain: 1951-1957) in this rich tapestry of political, socioeconomic, and cultural developments... Kynaston has a knack for narrative pacing and manages to hold the reader's attention in this comprehensive, multifaceted look at a changing period. Publishers Weekly Volumes full of treasure, serious history with a human face. Hilary Mantel, Observer, Summer Reads David Kynaston resembles a novelist impersonating a historian. His books read like fiction disguised as documentary ... His method evokes the sumptuous messiness of human experience. He depicts history as an unfolding, ill-managed pageant ... His books so enriching, improving and endearing ... Shrewd, funny and ever-readable ... In Kynaston's history books, the reader can hear the people speak. He has an elocutionist's sense of people's diction. Guardian The Britain we know today takes shape in these pages. Monumental and highly readable. Kirkus Reviews He conveys 1950s life more vividly than any historian before him ... Masterful. The Economist [Kynaston] adds yet more fascinating detail to his extraordinary pointilliste portrait of postwar British society. Wall Street Journal Brilliant and ambitious...a vivid snapshot of how Britain experienced the late 1950s and early '60s that emphasizes, rather than blurs, its complexity and contradictions...For anyone who grew up in England, even in a different period, most of the dizzying collection of names and products on display will be second nature. Quite what they will mean to American readers is another question. Perhaps they'll be familiar with ITV's 'Show Biz Corps' featuring 'Mr. Michael Miles's awful relish...Mr. Hughie Green's twangy trans-Atlantic archness,...Mr. Bruce Forsyth's twinkle-toes and strident congratulations.' But even if you don't know what 'Corrie' is, or never tuned in to watch rugby league (not union) coverage on 'Grandstand' with 'up and under' commentary by Eddie Waring, this will not stop you from enjoying the book. That pleasure is due in part to the sheer zest of Kynaston's style, which manages to be both powerful and fun. The side-by-side juxtapositions of a chronological, often day-by-day, account are underpinned by thematic analysis that builds as the book goes along...Kynaston is a master of the telling anecdote or document to make a broader point...The promise of a more egalitarian society, symbolized by the cultural dominance of four mop-topped lads from Liverpool, is next up for Kynaston in Opportunity Britain, the projected fourth volume of this outstanding series. But for all the 'modernity' of the period of 1957-62, a sense of wistfulness and loss hangs over this part of the island story. Of course, Kynaston has an example for that too. At the beginning of 1958, amid stirring scenes, the last passenger train to run between Abergavenny and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales made its poignant final journey. 'I have lived in a house where the back garden adjoins the line,' one local wrote afterward. 'The trains passing by have formed part of our lives. Last Monday was so quiet and then we realized that no longer would those grand ladies of the steam track pass by again. To many onlookers we may seem perhaps sentimental and a little foolish, but that sad last train with its even sadder whistles as it graced the track for the last time was to me and many others the end of something in our lives which will never be replaced.' Kynaston's gift is to make us see that the last train to Abergavenny really did matter. New York Times Book Review [Modernity Britain], an all-enveloping and mesmerizing social panorama, continues Mr. Kynaston's grand project of chronicling everyday life in Britain from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Thatcher era. Under the collective title "Tales of the New Jerusalem," he has already completed "Austerity Britain: 1945-1951" and "Family Britain: 1951-1957," whopping big books in which the author marshals vast quantities of data to create, dot by pointillistic dot, a vivid national portrait...proceeds at a lively pace in a brisk, appealing style. Mr. Kynaston, who seems to miss nothing, is like an air traffic controller, picking up incoming planes when they are tiny blips and following their progress intently throughout the book. New York Times OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, while most people were updating their phone apps, David Kynaston has been publishing the definitive history of Britain from 1945 to 1979, "Tales from a New Jerusalem." Its latest installment, Modernity Britain, 1959-62: A Shake of the Dice, comprises 464 of its to-date 2,368 pages, meaning that "Tales" will eventually clock in at nearly 5,000 pages, all devoted to 33 years in a small maritime nation in the northeast Atlantic that gave the world its lingua franca, the Magna Carta, and Shakespeare (and, more dubiously, the fruit cake, Tom Jones, and Prince Harry). It's astonishingly ambitious and exhilarating, and as near a historiographical analogue to the ideal map Borges imagined in his story "On Exactitude in Science" - one exactly as big as the province it covers - as is likely to appear in our lifetimes... As a sociological historian writing for a popular audience, Kynaston has many strengths. He is a masterful synthesizer. In addition to sifting through expert opinions on every important aspect of mid-century British life - "Recent economic historians have tended to be on [Woodrow] Wyatt's side of the argument and to offer largely critical appraisals of the quality of management through the 1950s and into the early 1960s," for example - he's pored over personal diaries, the domestic press, accounts written for foreign publications (such as London-based Mollie Panter-Downes's sharp, regular dispatches to The New Yorker), private correspondences (William Burroughs writing to Allen Ginsberg from Cambridge to say "he didn't think he could 'stick this English weather much longer,' that 'as soon as I get some bread we'll split south'"), radio transcripts, contemporary psychology, government white papers, business reports, and national polling summaries...[the book contains] extraordinary riches. As a testament to and reflection of one nation's irreducible complexity, it is unsurpassed, a great unspooling of messy, orderly humanity. Los Angeles Review of Books A literary and historical masterpiece...Kynaston, a supremely wry writer with a genius for the deadpan anecdote, has the lightest touch. The American Conservative