This book covers British history very well for the period from 1914 to 1999. So much one has lived through, and it is interesting to see it treated by a historian, who does not hesitate to give his views on what transpired. I found myself really caught up by the account of the momentous events which occurred during the years since 1914.

In his book, The Sixties, Arthur Marwick argues that a cultural revolution took place from 1958 to 1974, "the Long Sixties,." which revolutionized artistic standards and values and changed the individual's relation to society. He further divides the Sixties into the low Sixties (1958-1963), where things began in a relatively non-violent fashion, the High Sixties (1964-1968/9), where things culminated to a crescendo of violence to 1968, and the final phase (1969-1974). He looks at four countries where this cultural revolution took place: Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States.

The economic boom of the 1950's continued in the 1960's. Most families had radios, televisions, automobiles, and refrigerators. Teenagers became an economic class in themselves in that they became a target market. Most of them began buying their own clothing, toiletries, and luxury items, or influenced their parents into buying said items. Their tastes in music were a radical departure from their parents--e.g. Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley. Britain too experienced the "teenage ball" as coined in Colin MacInnes Absolute Beginners.

It was from this generation that the Students for a Democratic Society emerged, led by Al Haber and Tom Hayden, the latter who composed the Port Huron Statement which was the rehearsal of the major concerns to be taken up by the New Left and the Movement in the High Sixties.

I was particularly struck by the issue that only marginally succeeded in the United States (The Great Society) but was a progressive enlightened vision in Britain, "the civilized society," as coined by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, and the welfare state. The central concern was national insurance, where every person made a flat-rate contribution and could get that same rate when they became unemployed, later amended to where higher-salaried employees would contribute an added rate in exchange for an added rate in their pensions.

The five bases for the civilized society were the abolition of capital punishment (1969), the Abortion Reform Law (1967), the National Health Service (Family Planning) Act (1967) allowing local authorities to freely dispense contraceptive devices and advice, the Sexual Offenses Act (1967), which decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, and the Divorce Reform Act (1969).

The 1960's was a time of permissiveness in books and the arts. Consider the seizure of the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover by the post-master general. A district court judge ruled that the book could be sent through the mail because interpretations of censorship must change according to the attitudes of the day. The same argument was used in film censorship and in 1968, during the High Sixties, Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America instituted the four-tier code that replaced the outdated Hays Code, the same way Jack Trevelyan adjusted the film code in Britain.

Marwick gives credit to my favourite group, the Beatles. After all, they became icons of youth culture, although they didn't fare well in conservative France and Italy. They were the synthesis of the skiffle craze and Mersey Beat sound that began in the Low Sixties, heroes of working class backgrounds.

Marwick identifies 1968 in America and 1969 in France as marking the end of the High Sixties. In France, it was the end of Charles de Gaulle's regime. In America, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the SDS-led student siege of Columbia University were flashpoints. In France, there were anti-U.S. student demonstrations in the Sorbonne in the wake of the Tet Offensive, leading to full-blown riots that took place for weeks in May 1968.

Marwick points to the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the resignation of Richard Nixon on 9 August 1974 as a victory finally achieved by the anti-war protesters. However, the economic prosperity of the 1960's collapsed in 1974 with the effects of the Arab oil embargo.

A somewhat lengthy book that focuses more on cultural and socioecnomics rather than political, but an eye-opening read nevertheless.

A lot of the material is great, but stylistically the book is strained--like reading through a pile of thesis notecards.