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Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles |  | Author: Dominic Sandbrook
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Category: Book
List Price: $22.95
Buy New: $12.48
as of 2/10/2010 05:58 EST details
You Save: $10.47 (46%)
New (24) Used (9) from $11.97
Seller: smeikalbooks_london
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 814874
Media: Paperback
Pages: 928
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.8
ISBN: 0349115303
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.0855
EAN: 9780349115306
ASIN: 0349115303
Publication Date: May 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A clever and engaging history of Britain in the early 1960s.In the late 1950s, Britain was a society on the brink of unprecedented materialism, opportunity, and cultural change. From the bloodshed of the Suez Crisis to the giddy heyday of Beatlemania, British life seemed more colorful, exciting, and more controversial than ever. The memories of these years still resonate: Teddy Boys and the Profumo scandal, the New Wave and James Bond, the rise of immigration and the birth of pop music. So, too, do the personalities who dominated the period, including Kingsley Amis, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, and Paul McCartney. In this fresh and enlightening history of early 1960s Britain, Dominic Sandbrook illuminates the contradictions of a society caught between cultural nostalgia and economic opportunism and explores what British life was really like in the age of affluence.
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| Customer Reviews:
a wonderful & funny history of a confusing era October 11, 2006
Will De Vere (Melbourne, Australia)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful, well-written and funny history of seven chaotic and confusing years for Britain, from the arrogance & disillusionment of Suez to the birth of 'The Swinging Sixties'. Reading about Britain in the 1950s might sound like a recipe for depression - too much poverty, too many sexual hangups! - but Sandbrook makes the period seem fascinating and worth closer attention. It's often surprising to discover how many of the social changes we associate with the 1960s were already well-underway in the previous decade.
Like many Australians, I have a very ambivalent 'pity-admiration' attitude to the British, especially the English, but my parents lived there for a few years in the 1950s, two of my brothers were born there and I lived there for a while when I was a teenager, so British politics and society have always interested me. This history is exhaustive, carefully analysing everything from the high politics of the Suez crisis, decolonisation and nuclear war to the new wave of popular writers and filmmakers and inevitably to the Profumo scandal and the creation of James Bond (John Profumo died in March this year).
There are also many great character sketches here, for example, Harold MacMillan, who always posed as unflappable but was chronically anxious & lonely, and the brilliant and half-crazy Enoch Powell, one of the most scholarly politicians in history.
A notable feature of this immense and detailed book is its humour: I laughed long and often. Two of many stories: This is from the young writer Colin Wilson's diary,
'the day must come when I'm hailed as major prophet....I must live on, longer than anyone else has lived.....to be eventually Plato's ideal sage and king.....I am the major literary genius of our century....the most serious man of our age.' Hilarious.
And during a CND march in London, when Bertrand Russell tried to dramatically nail a protest letter to the door of the Ministry of Defence, the door opened and a faceless civil servant handed him a roll of sellotape.
A fascinating study of Britain in a period of huge change... July 29, 2006
nicjaytee (London)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
For the past 35 years the 1950's have been totally overshadowed by the 1960's - not just in the amount of literature, film & television dedicated to each decade's events, but also in our view of their relative "importance" - a situation that reflects the huge impacts of the 60's on the media, the arts, fashion, technology, politics and social attitudes. But, in historical terms, the 50's is an equally interesting and important subject - particularly from the UK's perspective - and in this lengthy, extremely well written, and deceptively titled "pure history" book Dominic Sandbrook shows why.
Deceptively titled? Well, even though the period covered is stated as being 1956 to 1963, in reality the book encompasses a much wider overview of political and, in particular, social history during the whole of the 50's while, quite wisely, ending pretty sharply in 1963 when "the 60's" - in terms of what the phrase has come to mean - really started. A good thing too, because what it explores in assiduous detail is UK society, and its politics, economics & arts, in a period of massive, under-estimated and often forgotten change.
And it's the sheer scale and speed of these changes that drives the book along. With a "consumer society" that, having been stalled between 1939 and the gradual lifting of austerity restrictions from 1951, spent a great deal of the 50's indulging in an orgy of "first time" buying of washing machines, refrigerators, televisions and cars - all of which transformed peoples' domestic lives and had major social & economic repercussions. With an Empire that in 1948 was the largest ever known and fundamental to the UK's economy, its international standing and its view of its place in the world, but which, by 1963 had been almost totally dismantled. With politicians grappling to control an economy made inherently unstable by the costs of maintaining the UK's increasingly anachronistic view of its military importance, the impacts of massive consumer spending, and, for the first time, major consumer debt. With an unequalled period of mass immigration from "The Colonies" throughout the 1950's causing a fundamental and permanent change to the cultural, social & economic mix of the population. With television developing, within just seven years from 1953 to 1960, into a hugely influential mass media vehicle, and with radical developments in literature & music from the mid 50's onwards pushing the boundaries of what was "acceptable" into new areas that precipitated much of what happened in the 60's, the individual & combined impact of these changes on UK society make for absolutely fascinating reading.
By the end of it all you're left in little doubt that, while "the 60's" continue to grab the headlines, it was "the 50's" (or more precisely the years from 1951 to 1963) that was a much more important period of change for the country, and that in explaining why in such a thorough and, above all, "readable" manner Dominic Sandbrook has fully achieved his goal of putting the period into its correct context. Fascinating, enjoyable and comprehensively researched, "Never Had It So Good" will change your view of the 50's, which is just about the best accolade that can be given to any history book.
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