Sixties Britain provides a more nuanced and engaging history of Britain. This book analyses the main social, political, cultural and economic changes Britain undertook as well as focusing on the 'silent majority' who were just as important as the rebellious students, the residents if Soho and the icons of popular culture. Sixties Britain engages the reader without losing sight of the fact that the 1960s were a vibrant, fascinating and controversial time in British History.
The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Who, and numerous other groups put Britain at the center of the modern musical map. Please Please Me offers an insider's view of the British pop-music recording industry during the seminal period of 1956 to 1968, based on personal recollections, contemporary accounts, and all relevant data that situate this scene in the economic, political, and social context of postwar Britain. Author Gordon Thompson weaves issues of class, age, professional status, gender, and ethnicity into his narrative, beginning with the rise of British beat groups and the emergence of teenagers as consumers in postwar Britain, and moving into the competition between performers and the recording industry for control over the music. He interviews musicians, songwriters, music directors, and producers and engineers who worked with the best-known performers of the era. Drawing his interpretation of the processes at work during this musical revolution into a wider context, Thompson unravels the musical change and innovation of the time with an eye on understanding what traces individuals leave in the musical and recording process.
This collection brings together a selection of original, research-led essays on more than a dozen avant-garde British writers of the 1960s, revealing this to be a crucial - and crucially overlooked - period of British literary history.
Nine classic short stories portraying the isolation, criminality, morality, and rebellion of the working class from award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe The titular story follows the internal decisions and external oppressions of a seventeen-year-old inmate in a juvenile detention center who is known only by his surname, Smith. The wardens have given the boy a light workload because he shows talent as a runner. But if he wins the national long-distance running competition as everyone is counting on him to do, Smith will only vindicate the very system and society that has locked him up. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” has long been considered a masterpiece on both the page and the silver screen. Adapted for film by Sillitoe himself in 1962, it became an instant classic of British New Wave cinema. In “Uncle Ernest,” a middle-aged furniture upholsterer traumatized in World War II, now leads a lonely life. His wife has left him, his brothers have moved away, and the townsfolk treat him as if he were a ghost. When the old man finally finds companionship with two young girls whom he enjoys buying pastries for at a café, the local authorities find his behavior morally suspect. “Mr. Raynor the School Teacher” delves into a different kind of isolation—that of a voyeuristic teacher who fantasizes constantly about the women who work in a draper’s shop across the street. When his students distract him from his lustful daydreams, Mr. Raynor becomes violent. The six stories that follow in this iconic collection continue to cement Alan Sillitoe’s reputation as one of Britain’s foremost storytellers, and a champion of the condemned, the oppressed, and the overlooked. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.
If the World Wars defined the first half of the twentieth century, the sixties defined the second half, acting as the pivot on which modern times have turned. From popular music to individual liberties, the tastes and convictions of the Western world are indelibly stamped with the impact of this tumultuous decade. Framing the sixties as a period stretching from 1958 to 1974, Arthur Marwick argues that this long decade ushered in nothing less than a cultural revolution – one that raged most clearly in the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Marwick recaptures the events and movements that shaped life as we know it: the rise of a youth subculture across the West; the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement; Britain's surprising rise to leadership in fashion and music; the emerging storm over Vietnam; the Paris student uprising of 1968; the growing force of feminism, and much more. For some, it was a golden age of liberation and political progress; for others, an era in which depravity was celebrated, and the secure moral and social framework subverted. The sixties was no short-term era of ecstasy and excess. On the contrary, the decade set the cultural and social agenda for the rest of the century, and left deep divisions still felt today.
'An active pleasure to read' Mail on Sunday Harold Wilson's famous reference to 'white heat' captured the optimistic spirit of a society in the midst of breathtaking change. From the gaudy pleasures of Swinging London to the tragic bloodshed in Northern Ireland, from the intrigues of Westminster to the drama of the World Cup, British life seemed to have taken on a dramatic new momentum. The memories, images and colourful personalities of those heady times still resonate today: mop-tops and mini-skirts, strikes and demonstrations, Carnaby Street and Kings Road, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, Mary Quant and Jean Shrimpton, Enoch Powell and Mary Whitehouse, Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger. In this wonderfully rich and readable historical narrative, Dominic Sandbrook looks behind the myths of the Swinging Sixties to unearth the contradictions of a society caught between optimism and decline.
British Fictions of the Sixties focuses on the major socio-political changes that marked the sixties in relationship to the development of literature over the decade. This book is the first critical study to acknowledge that the 1960s can only be understood if, next to its contemporary socio-political history, its fictions and mythologies are acknowledged as a vital constituent in the understanding of the decade. Groes uncovers a major epistemological shift, and presents a powerful meta-narrative about post-war literature in the UK, and beyond. British Fictions of the Sixties offers a re-examination of canonical writers such as Iris Murdoch, Angela Carter, Muriel Spark and John Fowles. It also pays critical attention to avant-garde writers including Ann Quinn, Bridget Brophy, Eva Figes, Christine Brooke-Rose, and J. G. Ballard, presenting a comprehensive insight into the continuing power the decade exerts on the contemporary imagination.
Travel back in time to the era when Carnaby Street led the world, a golden age of youthful innovation and exhilarating pop culture, and a fashion scene that defined a generation. The 1960s was one of the most exciting fashion decades of the twentieth century, during which British pop and youth culture gave birth to styles that would set international trends. This book reveals how the sweeping social changes of the 1960s affected the British look, how designers and entrepreneurs such as Mary Quant and John Stephen made London the fashion city of the decade, and the influence of public figures such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cathy McGowan, Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton on the national identity of a country finally recovering from a prolonged period of austerity.
Based on empirical evidence derived from university and national archives across the country and interviews with participants, British Student Activism in the Long Sixtiesreconstructs the world of university students in the 1960s and 1970s. Student accounts are placed within the context of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources from across Britain and the world, making this project the first book-length history of the British student movement to employ literary and theoretical frameworks which differentiate it from most other histories of student activism to date. Globalization, especially of mass communications, made British students aware of global problems such as the threat of nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, racism, sexism and injustice. British students applied these global ideas to their own unique circumstances, using their intellectual traditions and political theories which resulted in unique outcomes. British student activists effectively gained support from students, staff, and workers for their struggle for student’s rights to unionize, freely assemble and speak, and participate in university decision-making. Their campaigns effectively raised public awareness of these issues and contributed to significant national decisions in many considerable areas.
