Vernon Bogdanor

Adjustment and reappraisal

Having It So Good follows hard on the heels of Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good, which appeared last year. Both are doorstoppers — over 600 pages long — and the reader groans as he picks them up. Soon, no doubt, literary editors will be asking reviewers to weigh books rather than write about them.

Having It So Good is, in fact, two books rolled into one. The first, on the high politics of the period, offers an outstanding interpretation of the 1950s, and is likely to become the new orthodoxy against which, no doubt, younger historians will come to react. But Hennessy is more ambitious, insisting, in uncharacteristically pompous terms, that he ‘comes from a British historical tradition that is uneasy with high politics absorbed neat’.

The second book, which seeks to confront the social history of the period, to grasp the mentalité collective of the 1950s, is impressionistic and self-indulgent. There is too much fond reminiscence. We hear about the author’s lunches with his family — roast and two veg, followed by rhubarb crumble with custard; we learn of the purchase, by his sister, Maureen, of ‘a pair of two-toned, coffee and cream high-heeled shoes’, and even of the disposal of his father’s ashes in Kew Gardens. This is history as personal anecdote. For all his virtues, Hennessy simply cannot compete with Noel Annan whose book, Our Age, on the presuppositions of post-war intellectual life, is unlikely ever to be surpassed. Having It So Good would have been an even better book had it omitted the attempt at social history.

Having It So Good refers, of course, to Harold Macmillan’s famous slogan, ‘Never had it so good,’ by which he seems doomed to be remembered.

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