Since the 1990s three historians have entered the race to document as thickly as possible the postwar history of Britain. Peter Hennessy was the first starter, in 1992, but distracted by other concerns soon fell off the pace, managing to reach the early 1960s in three volumes. Dominic Sandbrook entered next, in 2005, cheating a little by starting at 1956, and has since yomped through the decades, producing five volumes taking us up to 1982. But perhaps slow and steady wins the race. David Kynaston started last, in 2007, and has only just reached 1965 in five volumes (six if you count his lockdown book, dwelling on 1962, On the Cusp). Unlike Sandbrook, he does not rely overmuch on newspapers – not really ‘the first draft of history’, only the first draft of what journalists think is history, chiefly politics – and where he does he plunges deep into the local press. Kynaston’s trump cards are diaries – dozens of them, able to reach down into mundane thoughts and diurnal lives. To them he adds lashings of television, cinema, novels, brisk summaries of academic literature, memoirs, social surveys and now his own memories: in 1962 he entered secondary school.

As a result his account is much more textured and alive than his rivals’. By 1962 he can use television as a click-track for the age, as every day his protagonists are watching soaps (Crossroads arriving alongside Coronation Street), Westerns, football and cricket, proliferating pop programmes (Ready Steady Go and Top of the Pops), The Wednesday Play for the more ‘advanced’, The Black and White Minstrel Show for the less. Some familiar themes thread their way through the narrative – Beatlemania, the Profumo affair, the rise and fall of That Was The Week That Was. Expected characters naturally rear their heads: the Pill, the Post Office Tower, mods and rockers. Some are, perhaps, unexpected, at least this early: David Bowie (still David Jones), the hairdressers Toni and Guy, Gyles Brandreth (from his teenage diary). Others benefit from hindsight: a beady eye is kept on the antics of Jimmy Savile; racism is on the rise, though not uncontested, unlike sexism, which contemporaries hardly notice, though Kynaston does. A few are still on stage today: David Hockney, Ken Loach, David Attenborough, John Cleese.

How to make all this hang together? What, to paraphrase Orwell, do the clatter of the Rolls Razor twin-tub washing machines, the to-and-fro of the young men in their Minis on the motorway, the queues outside the Rolling Stones concert, the rattle of counters in the bingo hall and the teenage girls cycling to grammar school in their uniforms possibly have in common? In earlier volumes – as early as the mid-1950s – Kynaston used ‘modernity’ as an organising principle, sure that ‘the British’ wanted it, albeit in familiar settings; but in 1962 they were still ‘on the cusp’ and now he is not so sure.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Peter Mandler teaches modern British history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. His latest book is The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2020).