The endless lure of fantasy

Every day our age seems to be getting madder and madder, in defiance of the notion that man is a rational creature and of the even more risible Whiggish narrative that we’re on a path of continual progress.

I’ll give you some examples: the murder of women’s sport by the transgender agenda; the rejection of nuclear power in favour of renewables; HS2; the possible prosecution of the Bloody Sunday paratroopers; the articles celebrating Shamima Begum as a victim; the idea that only gay actors should play gay characters; the government’s wilful rejection of the biggest popular mandate in British history.

I could go on, as I’m sure could you, but I won’t because it’s too depressing. Instead, I want to tell you about a marvellous book, now celebrating its 50th anniversary but still hugely fresh, perceptive and readable, which will help you put all these horrors into perspective and teach you to be more philosophical: Christopher Booker’s 1969 classic The Neophiliacs.

It’s a book that works on many levels, the most basic being a social and political history of the Swinging Sixties. As a key player in the satire boom — he was founding editor of Private Eye and a political scriptwriter of That Was The Week That Was (aka TW3) — as well as a jazz critic and a Spectator columnist, Booker helped to invent and define the era.

But by the time he wrote The Neophiliacs, he’d evidently grown wary of the monster whose creation he’d been part of. ‘Much of it was amateurish, juvenile and completely stereotyped in attitude,’ is his verdict on TW3 . And he’s similarly scathing about James Bond, David Bailey, the Beatles, pop generally, Mark Boxer, the collected works of John Osborne, the miniskirt…

Certainly, The Neophiliacs is a bracing corrective to the notion drummed into my own generation (b.