In the best possible taste

In 1968, aged 28, I wrote the first English book on art deco of the 1920s and 30s. Some people who had lived through that entre deux guerres period — in particular, the interior decorator Martin Battersby, who was girding his scrawny loins to write about it but was pipped at the post — resented my poaching on what they felt was their preserve. Just over 40 years on, I suppose I could feel the same way about this book on the 1970s by young art historians; but I don’t. They have given me insights into that fabled decade which escaped me as it swanned and swaggered by.

When I began writing about the Twenties and Thirties, I thought: why couldn’t I have lived through those fascinating times, when modernism was busting out all over — charlestons, skyscrapers, Bugatti sports cars, cocktails and laughter, the pristine Strand Palace Hotel, Fred and Ginger at the movies? But then I suddenly realised that I was living through a period just as captivating and enviable: the Beatles; the Twist; Biba; mini-skirts and flares; Beyond the Fringe; Not Only But Also; the space race; Pop art with at least two indisputable masters, Warhol and Hockney; kaftans and joss-sticks in boutiques; the human artworks of Punk in the Kings Road, Chelsea, Mohicaned and safety-pinned.

At the time, I must admit, I thought of the Seventies as not much more than a hangover from the Sixties — the mixture as before. But Dominic Lutyens and Kirsty Hislop, with their historical perspective, have shown me I was wrong. There was a definite caesura between the 1920s and 1930s — the Crash of 1929. The Twenties were a fizz-and-bubble reaction against the horrors of the first world war, while the Thirties had as their backdrop the Depression, hunger marches and the rise of the dictators in Germany, Italy and Spain (Oswald Mosley aping them in England).