Corrie and ready-salted crisps: the years when modern Britain began

In Burberry’s on Regent Street on a dank December day in 1959, David Kynaston records, ‘a young Canadian writer, Leonard Cohen […] bought a not-yet-famous blue raincoat’. For those joining Kynaston’s groaning historical wagon train for the first time, this is a sample of the sort of thing with which it abounds. Here is a fun little fact — gathered in from a distinctly marginal source — dropped in a wry half-sentence where it belongs chronologically, but looking forward to the future: a stitch in time.

A Shake of the Dice is the sixth book in Tales of a New Jerusalem, the great historian’s ‘projected sequence of books about Britain between 1945 and 1979’. He is chewing his way through the giant lettuce-leaf of his chosen decades like a particularly thorough tortoise. Hares: watch out.

Unlike most other popular historians, who favour the survey and the overflight, who take thematic bones and string facts and quotations onto them by way of illustration, Kynaston’s method is to build an enormous picture from the ground up by the patient and sometimes seemingly directionless (though only seemingly, and only sometimes — or perhaps only sometimes only seemingly) accumulation of detail. This is the garlic-and-sapphires-in-the-mud school of history. Does nothing, you wonder, escape his eye?

Who knew that Sylvia Plath (having been slipped a press ticket by Stephen Spender) was in the gallery for the last day of the Chatterley trial? Or that Beryl Bainbridge once appeared in Coronation Street as a ‘placard-carrying ban-the-bomb student friend of Ken Barlow’? Or that the opening scene of A Taste of Honey featured Hazel Blears ‘as a five-year-old street urchin wearing her mother’s best shoes’? Or that there was a brief craze for teenage girls to wear a yellow golliwog, ‘not as a sign of academic or athletic distinction, but as a sign that the wearer had had sexual intercourse’? That every serviceman in Britain had sixpence docked from his pay in order to buy Princess Margaret a marble-topped commode as a wedding present? Or that, in a generation-spanning moment in September 1961, Winston Churchill was observed tapping his toe to the twist at his grand-daughter’s coming-out dance?