The Sixties

by Jenny Diski

A brilliant, alternative take on sixties swinging London, Jenny Diski offers radical reconsiderations of the social, political, and personal meaning of that turbulent era.

What was Jenny Diski doing in the sixties? A lot: dropping out, taking drugs, buying clothes, having sex, demonstrating, and spending time in mental hospitals. Now, as Diski herself turns sixty years old, she examines what has been lost in the purple haze of nostalgia and selective memory of that era, what endures, and what has always been the same. From the vantage point of London, she takes stock of the Sexual Revolution, the fashion, the drug culture, and the psychiatric movements and education systems of the day. What she discovers is that the ideas of the sixties often paved the way for their antithesis, and that by confusing liberation and libertarianism, a new kind of radicalism would take over both in the UK and America.

Witty, provocative, and gorgeously written, Jenny Diski promises to feed your head with new insights about everything that was, and is , the sixties.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Cultural, Society, Womens

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Jenny Diski was a British writer. Diski was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction articles, reviews and books. She was awarded the 2003 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking around America With Interruptions.

Reviews

[Antonomasia]

[3.5] The bulk of this admittedly short book doesn't say much that's different from other 1960s counterculture history-memoirs: the protests, the drugs, films, books and lifestyle - but not much about the music here.

However there are still some really good chapters. The book opens when Diski is in her early teens - if she'd been from a more sheltered background she might have missed quite a lot of The Sixties, but she ran away from home and dropped out before she'd been in anything apart from school. In a way she achieved the teenage dream of being independent at a young age whilst living in the epicentre of her era's pop culture, but it wasn't always easy.

She was part of a Laingian therapy group for a while and as she had also used the era's rather unsympathetic NHS mental health system, is well placed to comment about the differences, plus she has plenty of anecdotes about the anarchic environment and its characters.

A lot of 60s counterculture memoirs are by men, and in one chapter here, Diski gives her view of living in a commune / large shared house during the sexual revolution, as a straight woman. Her account of the men's assumptions and sense of sexual entitlement gives some background reasoning to the more puritanical side of 1970s feminism. It also reminded me of how I treated men in my first year or two at university (thirty years later), before starting to learn - partly thanks to LGB flatmates - that it wasn't okay whoever it was, and no matter what the media implied about twentysomething men always being up for it.

By the early 70s Diski had found her feet, did teacher training and worked in a free school, hoping to help other troubled, potentially delinquent kids like the one she'd been ten years earlier. This chapter had several interesting references to deschooling, unschooling, Ivan Illich and similar theorists. (I then realised I've known one or two people who were into these theories, but as they, perhaps appropriately, hadn't used formal terms and references, I hadn't twigged the framework before. There's a lot of interesting stuff to think about, though at least it's not a pressing matter, as I don't have kids. In brief, I generally agree with the left-wing libertarian ethos, but pragmatically I think kids need to be given the skills to manage well in society as it is or is likely to be; that, even if it does inevitably bestow some conformism, at least gives them the choice about whether to fit in later.)

I'd always been a bit puzzled by Jenny Diski's status in the media: she's been on Radio 4 and in all the broadsheets and highbrow magazines for almost as long as I can remember, but I'd never found her to have much of interest to say compared with many similar commentators. As will annoy many, I get Mary Kay Wilmers' point about reviewers who are jargony or breathless, (doesn't mean I'm not myself sometimes, and CBA making the effort not to be, but those I keep reading and liking certainly aren't). Particularly in the light of that remark, I didn't understand why Diski got so many gigs in the LRB and similar publications; I've seen several bits of lazy research from her and there's no doubt there are female writers who take a more intellectually rigorous and original approach, who have probably missed out in favour of her. After reading her account of the Sixties, I'd assume she gets all that work because she must be interesting to know personally; she had a hard and varied early life and it gave her lots to talk and think about.

These less-talked about experiences are certainly worth reading if you're interested in the history of the day before yesterday, as a friend described it, but overall, the best first-person account of Britain in the 60s I read - at a time when I looked at several - was High Sixties by Roger Hutchinson. (And not only because I agreed with a lot of the author's opinions on how culture and society had developed since then.)

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Have been looking at Jenny Diski's blog after writing this post. This http://jennydiski.wordpress.com/2014/... was an excellent article that's more political than other pieces of hers I recall. It's exactly the sort of "yes it's quite good but..." commentary on contemporary uses of psychology that we don't see enough of. And she is one of the few other people I've seen defend (with reservations) Liz Jones. I like her more than I used to.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both a lucid and hard-headed memoir and a good capsule statement of the 'new spirit of capitalism' thesis.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good, sharp account of the 60s from someone who was there, and involved - Diski was participating in the Aldermaston march in 1963, aged 17- she lived in a commune, took the drugs, wore the clothes, taught in a free school, has insider knowledge of the psychiatric revolution, both as patient and counsellor, and the sexual revolution. On the latter she tells us it was impolite to turn down sex even if you didn't want to, participation was expected, so it was an era of mass rape, a bad time in many ways for women. However it was also a liberating era in that the women's movement, with books by Friedan and Greer published, was starting to take hold. Ditto 'gay lib'. She is clear eyed about the wishful thinking of the era, the naiveté of the young who thought that things would just get better, once the older generation's hold on power was loosened. It didn't occur to them that the right would take their language and use it against them, how in the Thatcher years to come, liberty would come to be 'libertarian' - the right to be rich and selfish, how the rights of individuals would come to be twisted to mean there was 'no such thing as society'. How treating psychiatric patients as individuals with full rights (problematically calling them the sane ones in some cases) would enable the Tories to close psychiatric hospitals and other communal facilities. Diski is quite rightly affronted by this deliberate misreading and disgusting turn of events.

Most of the stuff was familiar to me, as someone who also grew up in the 60s, although I was too young to participate (I was 8 when Diski was CND marching, and 15 at the end in 1970 - although many people say the 60s were really 63-73, and I did belatedly become a 'hippy', at least a weekend one, with long hair, loons, going to festivals etc.). I've read Illich and Laing (teacher training college) and Leary and so on, so while I appreciated her summaries and personal accounts I didn't learn much that was new. Although Diski repeats a few times the music was the best ever, there's little about it or art or literature, and that's what I'm most interested in.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It was the sixties" is a common refrain uttered by members of my parent's generation to justify the casual sex and drug use they engaged in during that period. The ones who attended rallies, sit ins, and protests invoke it with a bit more seriousness, usually in response to charges of radicalism. But whatever their purpose, those who wield the expression seem these days to fit a particular mold: middle to upper class, married, law-abiding, averse to hard drugs (granting the occasional bong hit it in the garage), and politically moderate (at least critical of anything resembling true progressivism) - in other words, exemplars of the establishment they once purported to reject. What happened, then, to so many of the devotees of 1960's counterculture? Were they mollified by the effects of civil rights legislation? Did they sour on collectivism as the Cold War wound down? Seduced by the profligacy of the 80's? Bludgeoned into compliance by the heavy-handedness of Reagan and Thatcher? The conventional narratives implied by these questions – that the kids either (1) grew weary of their purpose or (2) lost to the forces of capitalism (…and then joined them) – contain elements of truth, but they don’t sufficiently explain the complex process by which 60’s radicalism largely accommodated itself to mainstream politics and culture (what the true left today might call neo-liberalism) over time.

In her journalistic memoir of London in the 60’s, the late LRB contributor Jenny Diski, who herself occasionally slept around, consumed hard drugs, and marched against the war in Vietnam from her home across the pond, suggests that the seeds of this shift were present in the ideological framework of the movement from the very beginning, their germination hastened by a persistent failure of self-examination and widespread indulgence in the largely self-generated mythology of the epoch. Suffice it to say, many of its most fervent participants, Diski included, fancied themselves more liberated than they actually were. For one thing, cavalier attitudes about drugs and sex were pervasive before the 1960's. Not only is it true that the Beatniks and Existentialists were on to psychedelics before the Hippies (it's widely acknowledged that Kerouac wrote “On the Road” while on acid), but the parents of baby boomers - that is to say the men and women of nuclear families who stoically endured the Second World War - were no strangers to Codeine, Nembutal and other sedatives. Diski opens the section of the book dedicated to drug use in the 60’s with an account of the first time she overdosed and ended up in a psych ward. The drugs weren’t given to her by a guru or fellow traveler; they were supplied by her mentally ill mum, who dating back to the 1950’s maintained a cache of doctor-prescribed downers putatively to treat chronic headaches.

Diski places the notion of an organic proletarian sexual revolution under similar scrutiny, arguing that previous generations were inclined to open sexual relations too. Though her evidence here is mostly anecdotal, like her passing mention of the public copulation that took place in Hyde Park on VE Day, she needn’t describe the history of human sexuality in the West. It’s certainly true that sexual behavior became more experimental and transitory during the 60’s, but this “revolution,” should it even be called that, was largely made possible by the introduction of “the pill” in 1961. Diski argues that in both cases – drugs and sex – the main impetus for widespread change was generated externally, ironically enough in the State. It was through Great Society-like programs instituted by leaders of the war generation that young people in the 60’s obtained the means to procure everything from cannabis to codeine to contraception. “…as for the funding for our radical ways of life, it wasn’t the young really who were in charge of enabling this sexual revolution,” Diski reflects soberly. “The easing of sexual repression began, if it had a beginning, in the heart of everything we most despised: government.”

Our romantic image of the 60’s might be redeemed if it were true that the kids took from government in order to spite government. But, as Diski sees it, legislators had been advocating the loosening of social strictures themselves for quite some time already. Young folks were “reinventing their own freedom,” but significantly they were doing so “in a climate made ready for them” by their parents and elected officials. Diski quotes extensively from a statement by Roy Jenkins, Home Secretary of the Labour government in Great Britain from ’65 – ‘67, in which he objects to the vestiges of “Victorian morality” in British law and recommends “a general climate of opinion favourable to gaiety and tolerance, and opposed to puritanical restriction and a drab, ugly pattern of life.” Jenkins goes on, “It is not really a job for politicians…Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and to decide…the code by which they wish to live.” The problem with acting on permission, however, is that permission can be altered or revoked, as it was by Thatcher under austerity and simultaneously in the United States by Reagan via corporatism.

Diski observes another connection between the psychology of 60’s counterculture and the eventual ascent of Thatcher and Reagan. While the two entities are generally seen as antithetical, the author wonders if the emphasis on individual freedom ostensibly at the center of the cultural revolution wasn’t cleverly coopted by political conservatives who, 20 years later, would also argue for the diminished role of government in the lives of citizens. Whereas in the 60’s shaking off government meant expelling elected officials and lobbyists from the bedroom and the rec room, in the 80’s it meant eliminating publicly funded social welfare programs for the neediest members of society. (As an aside, if you’re curious as to what “individualism” looked like under the Iron Lady, see Douglas Stuart’s debut novel, “Shuggie Bain,” a visceral depiction of the awful conditions of the Glasgow slums during the Thatcher era, and winner of this year’s Booker Prize.) In fact, Diski concedes that some of her own influences during the early 70’s, the radical educational reformer Ivan Illich and the brilliant psychiatrist R.D. Laing, both of whom advocated vociferously for deinstitutionalization in their respective fields, to some extent contributed to the abandonment of the students and patients they worked so passionately to liberate.

The case of Dr. Laing and his contemporaries is especially interesting. Diski draws a line from Laing’s rejection of traditional conceptualizations of “madness” and “sanity” (in many ways in step with the emerging theories of Foucault and the post-structuralists) to the publication of Thomas Szasz’s “The Myth of Mental Illness,” which also aimed to discredit psychiatry and promote individualism, though with a slightly different justification and the critical, if overlooked, implication that doing away with psychiatric classifications means eliminating their protections under the law. Those who read Laing and Szasz in the 60’s and early 70’s with an eye towards the abolition of oppressive state-run mental institutions (and their common use of electroshock therapy) shutter today at the realization that equally oppressive institutions, such as the American prison industrial complex and the draconian drug-obsessed court-system that sustains it, have been erected in their place. Even more sobering is the not entirely unsubstantiated claim that these institutions count among their ideological forebears both Laing and Szasz. Diski regrets her shortsightedness on the matter and reassures the reader of her intentions. I suspect she represents the rule, but one imagines that more than a few of the original anti-psychiatry advocates enthusiastically followed their misapprehension of the movement all the way to its tragic and illogical conclusion in broken windows policing, three strikes laws in the US, and the overt criminalization of addiction and other mental health disorders in the West beginning in the mid-70’s.

For all of its journalistic merit and intellectual originality, what stands out most in this work is the author’s palpable sense of alienation from the rapidly changing world around her. This is characteristic of Diski’s personal writing. Essentially abandoned by her biological parents in childhood and later adopted by the brilliant, if emotionally unavailable, British novelist Doris Lessing, she frequently defaulted, in life as in literature, to the role of natural outsider. But a curious, insightful, and occasionally self-reproving one – not at all the cynical or hard-hearted type. Here this crucial distinction enables an even-handed reflection on a subject that is too often treated with either blind idolatry or categorical contempt. Balancing her criticism of the millions of youngsters who were mainly concerned with “the more demonstrative, emotionally satisfying forms of revolution” is a sober appraisal of Diski’s own armchair tendencies: “I told myself that smoking dope, dropping acid, shooting up Methedrine and reading about other ways of being was a form of resistance against the unsatisfactory world. I settled for Outlawhood. Or, escape, as others, more politically committed, would reasonably have said.”

Nowhere in the book does Diski’s detachment resonate more deeply, though, than in the short section dedicated to Seymour, her American expatriate acquaintance who fled to England to avoid being sent to Vietnam. To the author, Seymour embodies the difference between “the American resistance against Vietnam” and “the European resentment of the establishment” – put another way, the difference between an existential struggle compelled by an unjust war (and legal segregation) and one that was in some ways only experimenting with revolution on behalf of the other. Recalling an anti-war event she attended with Seymour and his coterie of militaristic dissidents, during which she was reluctantly thrust into a highly-organized charge on Grosvenor Square, Diski writes: “It wasn’t that I wanted to be there, but Seymour’s iron grip wasn’t loosening and no matter how hard I looked at him he kept his face to the front, and his eyes glazed in excitement.” Then, a few pages later: “I’d lost Seymour, who had finally dropped my hand in the scrummage, and I last saw him running, head down and screaming like a dying bull, towards the front entrance of the Embassy, a small, dark invasion force of his own.”

This passage symbolizes the experience of many in the 60’s countercultural and anti-war movement in Diski’s home country and beyond. There was something tangible there, a barely-contained flame roiling in the center of it all. But many of those who could have stoked it into something larger and more substantial remained safely beyond it, some of them distracted by their own delusions or self-interest, some led astray by false theorizing, and others content merely to act out the motions of revolution.

[Nicola Balkind · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not particularly interested in the Sixties, but for Diski I made an exception. This is a commissioned book of essays (part of an mid-2000s series about the previous century) about the Sixties in the UK, largely informed by the author’s own experiences. There were some illuminating ideas in the early chapters, but the later ones, particularly final two essays on education and mental health awareness and treatment, weren’t very interesting or relevant to me.

[Dennis Lappee · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author recounts growing up in the sixties and seventies. She reflects on the ideas of (part of) her generation, which rebelled against the old world, and their attempt at bringing about something new. Some reflections which stood out most to me I recount below.

On the pervasive ethos of sexual liberation (perhaps especially in light of effective contraception).

However, by the late Sixties, although we may not have done recreational drugs, we did do casual sex. We tried hard to make sex as casual as sleeping. ... People had sex because they and it were there, like climbing mountains but with less effort and preparation required, and, as we thought then, danger-free. It was late, someone would stay over or not go back to their own room. You might even really fancy someone, suddenly, or you'd think: why not? There never seemed to be a legitimate answer to that. It was on the one hand part of the vital and present task of experiencing experience, and on the other a contemporary version of good manners. Sex was a way of being polite to those who suggested it or who got into your bed. It was very difficult not to fuck someone who wanted to fuck you without feeling you were being very rude. My guess, no, my certainty, is that large numbers of people slept with friends, acquaintances and strangers that they had no desire for. I also guess that this was more desultory for women, few of whom, I regret to say, seemed as jaunty the following day as the men who waved them a cheery farewell.

This reminded me most immediately of Louise Perry's excellent book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. There, she posits that one of the consequences of the pill is that women have fewer reasons to reject sexual advances, especially given the widespread acceptance of sex as nothing more than any other social interaction. As Diski admits in this fragment, and Perry lays out, despite being pushed as universally liberating and equalising, this revolution in sexual behaviour reveals instead a shift towards the short-term coupling preferred by men.

Diski goes on to write

But there was a large principle at state. If sex was no longer going to be a taboo then it was hard to think of a good reason not to have it with anyone who came along. It was uncool to say no. It was easier to say yes than to explain. It was difficult to come up with a justification for refusing to have sex with someone that didn’t seem selfish. The idea that rape was having sex with someone who didn't want to do it didn’t apply very much in the late Sixties. On the basis that no means no, I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn't take no for an answer. But not wanting wasn't the main thing. It doesn’t sound so exciting, this sexual revolution, does it? Mostly it wasn't.

Some further consequences of this pursuit of unrestricted liberty were in education. After all, what does the establishment have to teach us?

The idea of voluntary learning grew into the thought that curricula should be as much the responsibility of the student as the teacher.

Education should instead become a tool of revolution.

Our logic was as compelling as that which had made us already believe we would change everything just by our novel presence in the reactionary world. It was a takeover, but an inevitable one. A generational takeover, by the generation that thought differently. The kids would recognise our benevolent and socially radical intentions and join us in the endeavour. Institutions couldn't resist our will if we participated in them. Now we got the idea of ‘boring from within. They would become our institutions, new, compassionate, world-changing, and above all equitable.

This notion of 'equity', captured in the idea that "[p]eople would only be free when they educated themselves and each other all at the same level ", stemmed in large part from the socialist current running through the movement. Perhaps integral to it, or instead a twisting of the 'real' socialist ethos, this manifests itself in a certain disdain for the successful.

It got to the point where in some sense we punished the brighter kids for not being underprivileged. When Allie had been at the free school for a while, she became very taken with looking at buildings in a new way that had been pointed out to her on school visits round London with the local architect. She began to think she might want to be an architect. She told this to one of the play-leaders at the adventure playground whom she had known and been friends with in the days when she bunked off school all the time. “You're getting a bit above yourself, aren't you?’ he said. The radicals couldn't always cope with education actually having an effect. If the oppressed stopped behaving like the oppressed, we didn't really like it.

[E · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jenny Diski's "The Sixties"--an odd blend of history and memoir--is divided into six sections recounting 1960s resistance and radicalism in Britain: consumption and cultural output (clothes, films, books, media), drug use (prescription and illegal), sex and (briefly) sexuality (free love, Stonewall in New York), political strife (radicalism, resistance, political philosophies, laws, even the dole), education (non-traditional schooling), and mental health (experimental psychological practices).

Diski's refusal to either denounce or condone experimentation with radical beliefs and projects makes "The Sixties" far more palatable than many books written about the same time period. Diski is able to honour the noble and moral aspects of radical politics while at the same time turning a rightfully jaundiced eye on poorly considered policy and unconsidered political platforms (Diski frequently points out the failing of herself and her peers to realize the significant differences between social liberalism and libertarianism).

As an American, it was especially interesting to compare and contrast my understanding of the American '60s and early '70s movements with their British counterparts. In America we had the Vietnam war, Civil Rights and Black Separationist movements, and Gay Rights (Stonewall!). I think Americans were, frankly, more desperate than Brits who, provided for by their parents (many of whom had suffered directly in WWII) and the government, experienced a more lenient social climate.

I especially enjoyed the chapters on education and mental health, which touched on alternative schooling and deschooling (in the case of the former) and a movement to embrace "madness" (primarily schizophrenia) and reject rigid conceptions of normality (in the latter case).

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief, often amusing and lightly insightful memoir of growing up in London during the mythic 1960s. The differences between her England and the America I grew up in can be summed up in two words: "race" and "Vietnam." It's not exactly that Diski's 60s were free of the political tensions of the US, but she clearly felt herself "free' in a way that focused almost entirely on what we would have called the "personal" side of things. She knows this, commenting at one point that for all the emphasis on the "personal is the political" mantra, for those in her circles, "the personal was mostly the personal." She's at her best in thinking through the relationship between sixties "liberation" and the "libertarianism" of (in very different ways) R.D. Laing, Ivan Illych and Margaret Thatcher. From there she moves to the conclusions (tragic in her mind) that the gap between hippies and yuppies was minimal and that Thatchers "there is no such thing as society" had its disturbing parallels in the counterculture. Comparing her take with Todd Gitlin's (The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage) highlights the difference between the "counterculture" and Gitlin's "New Left." Liked her takes on fashion and the somewhat desultory sexual freedom of the communes. However, though she writes several times that "the music really was better," she pays almost no attention to music.

Mostly for people with a serious interest in the 60s.

[sevdah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the chapters on madness and her thoughts on rape culture woven into the sexual revolution, as well as her account on free schooling; some parts were a bit dull, but generally a very well written memoir that - thank God! - didn't romanticize the era at all.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books which I enjoyed while I was reading, but a month later and I have retained almost nothing of it except a sense of the atmosphere, which was wry and thoughtful. I did like hearing about Diski's 60s and her view of it looking back, and it confirmed me in my sense that I want to read more of her work, but nothing else has stayed.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why is it that everyone who grew up in the Sixties is convinced that, say what you will about anything else, the music was the best. Don’t they know every generation feels that way. Has it ever occurred to them that music heard during the period between child- and adulthood is always going to resonate with the place and time. It’s nostalgia. Great music or shit, it doesn’t matter, because the music is just a trigger to memory and hindsight is not only clearest it’s prejudice.

Jenny Diski starts her memoirist history THE SIXTIES with that literary refrain about the music, which was great, but it’s a bit facetious and a bit not. She’s a clever writer, elegant and dryly humorous, and insightful, so I forgive this generational tic. We can respectfully disagree about the music, which was often pompous, but she has a much bigger story to tell over the deeply rich 134 pages of the book.

From early sections on fashion and drugs, to more troubling later ones on politics and education, Diski starts off as a depressed young woman and ends up starting a free school. She’s well-read and shamelessly hedonistic, thankfully avoiding the mea culpa of recovery and redemption lit, maturing out of sexual promiscuity and hard-drug use. She ends up in a mental institute, really a progressive group therapy center, disillusioned.

Soberly, she acknowledges the link between hippies and yuppies, how the naiveté of her generation may not have been responsible for but helped pave the groundwork towards the selfish exploitation of the Thatcher years. It doesn’t end there. She regretfully admits the changes championed by the boomer generation were superficial and structurally not much is different at the time of her writing (early new millennium). It’s a bit of a downer, but then there’s always a crash after the high.

[Sally Edsall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diski was there. She was institutionalised in psych houses, started a free school over a weekend, practiced "child-cented learning" in a comprehensive school in London's East End, bought and wore the clothes, took the drugs, had the sex, went to the protests & enjoyed the music.

This is a wonderfully clear-eyed appraisal of the era from the early 60s to early 70s in the UK.

It's not by any means a conservative recanting, more a re-appraisal of what the hell was going on and crucially from a woman's point of view.

Women always were the bring-a-plate (my expression) appendages to the revolution. Many words have been written about the Sixties by blokes, far fewer by the chicks who were there.

She talks about the nascent women's movement & gay lib.

I'll add some of my favourite quotes when near a bigger keyboard.

It finishes by explaining how (but not blaming) the 60s led inexorably to the greedy 80s... sweeping the path. Liberation got confused with libertarianism.

It's a slim volume that packs a punch. Diski always manages to convey so much with an economy of words. A great loss to the world when she died in April this year.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jenny Diski is not with us any longer and I miss her already. She was never a sentimental writer. She told it as she saw it and I appreciated that. This little book, The Sixties, is no different. She sums up those years from the perspective of a citizen of Great Britain, and that is fine because as I saw it at the time that was where it was all happening anyway. On the other side of the pond we had civil rights marches and the Vietnam War, but in England things were a bit more fun. The music and the movies and the fashion helped me drown out the sound of the body bag count on the nightly news. The cute boys in all the music groups became posters on my childhood walls. Of course there was more, even in England. There were movements in women's liberation, and education, and the treatment of the wayward and mentally ill. Ms. Diski had a front row seat to this, and provides valuable reflection on that front. I enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone with a special interest in the 60s in England, and on the writings of the late Jenny Diski.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

For someone who missed the sixties entirely, I had been fed the image that it was an era of free love, liberation and permissiveness. This book describes what it was like to live through it, and how it paved the way for mass consumerism, that the idea of letting individuals do what they like was utilised by the radical right by the late 70's to bring about Thatcherism. The sexual revolution just imposed a new moral code that could be just as restrictive, and there were still harsh punishments if women became pregnant out of wedlock. Experimentation with education, drugs, mental health care and politics during this period have set us down the path we are now on.
A fascinating book, and as always with Jenny Diski's writing, a pleasure to read.

[Theresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diski lived her adolescence in the 60's in London. A number of the elements of the 60's as lived in the U.S. are in this memoir, but it is thin soup by comparison. The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War draft, friends being killed, families torn apart, cities in flames, universities shut down, tanks in the streets, took place here and also defined the 60's for us, her age peers. This essay does bring back the sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, feminism, and the revolutions in education and mental health that were common to both places. How to evaluate the lasting effects? Did those movements pave the way for the 80's individualism? Again, it depends on where you lived them.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this earlier today and could not put it down. It is a very honest account (a mixture of history and personal experience) of what Diski believed worked, and more vividly and interestingly, didn't work about the sixties generation. The chapter, Projecting the Future, was particularly illuminating for its observations and honesty. Anyone who still actually believes the Sixties was some utopian, care-free, all-embracing commune, which was unique in changing the world, should especially read this. Although in fairness, most of us are just not that naive any more.

[Aggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun, interesting read about growing up as a young female radical in 1960s England. Ms. Diski muses about her addiction to drugs, her feelings of sexual liberation, communal living, her three stints in psychiatric hospitals, the war in Vietnam, English vs. American views of the war, and other topics. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It wasn't boring and Ms. Diski writes with honesty and wit about her personal experiences in an era full of political, racial, and sexist strife.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and well-written reflection on aspects of sixties radicalism from someone who was both on board and less on board with some of it, written as she approached death in middle age. Very short as it was designed for a short books series, though there's a wisdom here--it reads like a supremely well written personal zine, ala Cometbus/Burn Collector/Doris. The end is abrupt and each chapter could have been expanded, however.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This did not reflect my recollections of the sixties as much as I thought it would. The major difference is that in the US the Vietnam war dominated the culture and this was written from a British perspective. It was somewhat interesting, and thankfully short.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enviable and emulatable writing style, although she losed her cold-eyes clarity when discussing enducation and politics, which are obviously dear to her heart. But wow is she great on the other aspects of the era.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"remaking the world," "projecting the future," and "changing our minds" - chapter titles of the best parts - explaining the realy enduring value of the era. Not nostalgia-driven. Insightful and nuanced history.

[TD · Rating 3 out of 5]

Knocked off a few stars due to the limitations of the format - this appears to be one in a multi-author series, so the singularity normally found in Jenny Diski's stories is absent here. Still a good read if you're in the mood for a school lecture-level review of 1960s British history.

[sisterimapoet · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice little dip into some of the key issues.

[Mscout · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, somewhat interesting memoir of a teen of the 60s. Interesting insights, but overall just a little too precious for my tastes...

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, though not necessarily representative, slice of England in the 60's. Better as memoir than history.

[Emma Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting introduction to key themes of the times. Written with clarity and wry observances.

[Tina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Started off quite interesting,but the last 50 pages bored me rigid

[Christa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spot on. Insightful analysis of how liberalism of the 60s morphed into libertarianism of the 70s and beyond. Loved the last chapter on Laing and Szasz and the current plight of the mentally ill.

[Eliza · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disappointing. Not sure what this is meant to be and I’m not convinced that Diski was either.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful and searingly honest look back at the 60s with no rose tints in those heart-shaped Lolita glasses