I haven't concluded this by a long shot yet - indeed am only in the nervous nineties, one-eighth of the way - but given the horrendous and inarticulate dismissal of the book by the previous reviewer I can only suggest he was assessing either a different book or self-referencing his ability to digest a remarkably far-reaching critical analysis of a watershed era. I don't normally assess a book before I've finished reading it, but so far this is a five star volume, and to counter-balance the previous reviewer's dismissal I will rate it as such until persuaded otherwise ...

(one month later!)

So: no easy book to read, and day jobs so intrude. No reason, though, to revise greatly my 15% impressions. Marwick, it is true, was (he died in 2006) a pugnacious historian, unprepared to kowtow to perceived or received orthodoxies. Perhaps that is why the previous revirewer dismissed this colossal tome with his misguided monosyllable. Marwick delivers blow after blow to that which he defines as 'the Great Marxisant Fallacy', the wearing of spectacles that insist eternally on revolutionary warfare, the pitting of a persecuted proletariat against an eternal bourgeousie. Or perhaps not eternal: perhaps one day the revolution will end all injustice and the Great Marxisant Utopia will be born. But, Marwick argues, 'the long sixties', 1958-1974, was not that revolution.

Marwick casts a phenomenally wide net, an intellectual drag-net perhaps, to support his case. From the renaissance of the clitoris to the disastrous architectural obscenities of Minoru Yamasaki, from the evangelistic missions of soccer in the USA to the false eyelashes of Twiggy, from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, from Lady Chatterley to Germaine Greer to Margaret Thatcher. Focussing on the USA, Britain, Italy and France (with occasional glances to Germany and Scandinavia), his coverage is exhaustive. (I am unconvinced that the French rugby captain in the mid-1990s was Algerian - see 754 - and assume he is referring to Moroccan-born Abdelatif Benazzi).

He writes with a slightly discursive style, occasionally intruding as a narrator, occasionally cross-referencing with awkward insertions of 'as I have said' or 'as I will argue' (e.g. 402). Given that he has written a controversial tome on beauty he may be justified in intruding with a sudden unwarranted observation regarding student radical Mario Savio's 'good looking wife' (639), but the intrusion does not assist the case he is making at that point. These are small irritations, and one suspects wild horses, let alone mere editors, could not have kept him from his quirks.

A greater irritation - if a reader chose to be irritated -would be the occassional lapse into pugnatious unprofessionalism, most famously his references to film director Lindsay Anderson's 'upper class socialist' views as 'clap-trap' (if a film-making genius) on page 140 (where he also, in my view rightly, dismisses rugby league as the 'most vicious and unglamorous of all the football codes'!) or Pakistani Trotskyite Tariq Ali's writings as 'dogmatic tosh' (634 - a page on which he returns to the sobriquet 'clap-trap', now applied to Marxist ideology). He refers frequently to 'the absurdity of Marxism' (290, 614, 733), but presents a strong case for his view, and I find little base on which to disagree. Perhaps a bizarre reference to a permanent erection in the women's dormitory at Barnard College, New York (658), left me a little nonplussed, but on the whole his occasional asides are entertaining and illustrative.

Undergirding his argument is the firm belief not only that Marxist dialectic is 'clap-trap', but that the cultural revolutions of the long sixties were personal human journeys, not imposed meta-narratives: 'The world did change, but often in far corners, out of sight of the counter-cultural impresarios, entrepreneurs, and performers, and not by way of dramatically substituting one entire culture for another' (733). To support this case this he has presented diary accounts, minutes, newspaper cuttings, the personalised observations rather than the scholarly analyses, and done so masterfully.

The optimism of the sixties was killed, Marwick argues, not by iconic moments such as Altamont's chilling rock-fest (748-9) and the brutal emergence of the Weathermen (occasion for one rare mention of Bob Dylan, who I think deserves more analysis in the narrative), the Panthers, Red Brigade and even the IRA, but by the oil crisis of 1974 (733). Hedonism is so much less attractive when the hip-pocket nerve begins to tighten in horror, and an Easy Rider escapade becomes financially unviable.

Marwick has a delightful turn of phrase: 'a new law to protect historic city centres was enacted, described by two Italian experts as having "an almist charismatic" value attached to it, meaning (I think) that this law was actually obeyed' (782). Asides such as this enhance the human warmth of his writing. Once (786) he slips into self-aggrandizement: 'as I myself have argued'. It is a rare lapse in taste. By and large he takes his reader on an exhaustive and exhausting journey through every conceivable facet of the cultural re-arrangements of his decade.

This, then, is not 'crap', as the previous reviewer has suggested, but a tour de force. Imperfect perhaps, but so universal in scope, and so enticing in style that the imperfections are overcome. I read this book to understand myself a little better - to know better the forces that shaped my world. As one inadvertantly and unknowingly dragged under the spell of Timothy Leary (310-312 and elsewhere) I was relieved to find that I was not alone. As one bemused and unconvinced by simple Marxist social analyses by lesbian separatist theorists I was pleased to find tools of critique that reassured me that vaginal orgasm was not altogether a result of bourgeois oppression.

An outstanding book, and a month of my life well spent. ( )

crap. ( )