Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties
PETER HENNESSY
(ALLEN LANE, 624 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • tel 020 7799 4064
Professor Peter Hennessy is a fine historian of late-twentieth-century Britain. He is a master of all the published sources, and his generous personality, academic distinction and unquestioned integrity have meant that he adds to them a lifetime of the confidences and insights of most of those who have actually made our history. People have talked to him not only because they know they can trust him, but because he clearly respects and even loves many of the institutions that comprise our modern state.
His latest study of Britain covers the beginning of his times and mine. We are much the same age, Catholic scholarship boys who grew out of our teens into a world of nuclear crises, decolonisation, a presidential assassination and political scandal. My first term at university coincided with the Cuban missile crisis. I remember a don’s party interrupted by a handful of moral and intellectual delinquents delighted at the bulletin that Washington’s “fair knight” had been gunned down in Dallas: good news, they thought, for the Left. I left college a couple of years later as the first sparks of Harold Wilson’s scientific white heat were already starting to burn out.