Sandbrook is decisive where it’s called for — on more than one occasion, he knocks down a piece of received wisdom with the word ‘nonsense’ — and his story is leavened with a debunking humour. Peter Sellers’s pomposity about his immersive method of acting, for example, is undermined by its context in an interview: ‘I do not exist,’ he told Kermit the Frog in 1978.
The ground is covered evenly and judiciously — Suez, the gentle shucking of empire, immigration, Butskellism and the affluent society (he often talks of the ‘threat’ or ‘problem’ of affluence), spy scandals, Profumo, the satire boom, the emergence of James Bond, and what have you.
It’s never less than readable, and the author revels in the personality quirks of his protagonists. Colins Wilson and MacInnes (authors respectively of The Outsider and Absolute Beginners) are kicked repeatedly, for the effete and self-absorbed poseurs that they were. Nor does David Frost fare too well.
What an odd bunch, mind you, some of these people were, Enoch Powell particularly. At 14, he was translating Herodotus as a private project. At university, he worked from five in the morning to nine at night and ‘quite literally had no social life at all’. He was, at 25, the youngest professor in the entire British empire. Yet cooking breakfast for a brother officer while he was in the army — as recorded in Simon Heffer’s biography — was a task that entirely defeated him:
The fire he had lit was being unco-operative, so he threw some petrol over it, causing the flames to flare up and singe his moustache. He cut his finger trying to cook the sausages and the water he was boiling fell over the flames and put the fire out. Strachan, who was more practical, offered to help. ‘You keep away,’ Powell snarled at him. ‘If they want to be bloody-minded, I’ll show them, by God I will.’ The breakfast was not a success, nothing in Powell’s life having prepared him for the culinary challenges he was now facing. Strachan tactfully drank his disgusting tea and ate his undercooked sausages, while Powell, unused to failure, stomped around muttering, ‘Bloody inefficient! Bloody inefficient!’, too angry to eat.
There is much to be enjoyed and admired here. Sandbrook writes lucidly and with brio even about economics, effectively dramatising Macmillan’s hopeless addiction to public spending (he just wanted to be loved, apparently) and the chancellors it cost him. His range is considerable, and he lovingly and persuasively knits high politics and economics to social history and its cultural emanations. Early chapters make nice distinctions between the writers of the Movement (Amis and co, smart grammar-school kids, who affected philistinism as an antidote to less sophisticated affectations), the dramatists and film-makers of the New Wave, and their satellites. The set for the original production of Look Back in Anger, he notes drily in passing, portrayed a flat that was rather too small to contain a kitchen sink.
As a more or less exact contemporary, I find myself in awe of Sandbrook’s apparent breadth and depth of reading, and his enthusiasm. This must have been what he was doing while the rest of us were watching TV.
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