If you can remember the Sixties, so they say, you weren’t there. The historian Dominic Sandbrook, born in 1974, definitely wasn’t there: and, as he argues, that’s why he’s in a better position than most to remember it. The myth of the Sixties as a period of rapid and unprecedented change, a ‘revolution’ that in the blink of an eye tuned out Elgar in favour of Lennon and McCartney and saw the Kids wresting power from a series of vague, tweedy Edwardian grandees, is one constructed, with nostalgia, by those who lived through the period. Some thought it a disaster, most a liberation. But more or less everyone, Sandbrook argues, seems to agree that the period saw the social order turned on its head.

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