You know what they say: if you remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there. Virginia Nicholson was a shy girleen in bare legs and a cotton dress when that decade was going full bore; now she’s put together a kaleidoscopic, 492-page history of that most “yeasty” of decades: cue the pill, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tights, Mary Quant, Christine Keeler, the Beatles, the Vietnam war, the Rolling Stones, civil rights, Thalidomide, abortion, mini-skirts, Ready Steady Go, hippies, Zandra Rhodes, “free” love, rock’n’roll, RD Laing, drugs and, at the 11th hour, feminism. Yeastiness indeed. This was Britain emerging post war via a “youthquake” into a consumer boom; everything old was “square” – that is, to be rejected. Little rich girls’ dreams morphed from chaste debutante presented to the queen (“We didn’t drink, we didn’t have sex, we still wore white gloves”) to being Mick Jagger’s drugged up girlfriend in a “pussy pelmet”.

Source: The Irish Times June 09, 2019 04:52 UTC