1965: The Year Modern Britain Was Born.
London: Simon & Schuster U.K., 2014.
Book information: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com.
Author information:
- Christopher Bray at The Guardian.
- Christopher Bray at The Spectator.
- Christopher Bray at The Daily Beast.
- Christopher Bray at Linkedin.
Book Reviews:
- David Lister, "Book Review: The Sixties didn't begin when we think they did – or so this revisionist cultural history claims," The Independent, 17 April 2014.
- Dominic Sandbrook, "Review," The Sunday Times, 27 April 2014. (subscription required)
- Iain Morris, "Review: analysis of a revolution: A combination of arts criticism and political commentary demonstrates why the events of the 1960s are still relevant," The Observer, 28 April 2014.
- Roger Lewis, "The groovy time good old Britain died," Daily Mail, 1 May 2014.
- Tom Slater, "1965: The Year Everything (Almost) Changed: The Sixties offered more questions than answers, but the optimism of that decade is worth celebrating," Spiked Online, 9 May 2014.
- Jonathan Mirsky, "Naked Truths," Literary Review, Issue 421, June 2014. (subscription required)
- David Marx, "Book Review," David Marx : Book Reviews, 20 July 2014.
- Alan Glynn, "It Was a Very Good Year," Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 November 2014.
Discusses some of the problems with single year books. - Victoria Segal, "Review: While more famously cosmic or revolutionary years followed, Bray believes 1965 ‘gave us a new tomorrow’ as this fascinating survey shows," The Guardian, 23 January 2015.
Video and Lectures: 1960s Britain
- James Vernon, "Lecture 24," History 151C, The Peculiar Modernity of Britain, 1848-2000, University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2011.
Prof. Vernon discusses the 1960s in this lecture from a course on Modern Britain (course description; YouTube playlist). Note that he comments on the arbitrary device of using decades to study change in human societies. - Dominic Sandbrook, "The Lost World of 1962," Gresham College, London, 5 July 2012.
Lecture webpage at Gresham College.
Sandbrook sees 1962 as a hinge year. - 'Annus Mirabilis', a poem by Philip Larkin (1922–1985).
Or perhaps we should view 1963 as the hinge year? (Larkin, a source for a few comments in Bray's narrative, is never a focus of attention in Bray's book.) - The 60s: The Beatles Decade, UKTV History, 2006.
Episode 1: "Teenage Rebels: 1960-1962" (copy 1, copy 2)
Episode 2: "Sex, Spies and Rock and Roll: 1962-1964" (copy 1, copy 2)
Episode 3: "Swinging Britain: 1965-1966" (copy 1, copy 2)
Episode 4: "Street Fighting Years: 1967-1968" (copy 1, copy 2)
Episode 5: "The Party's Over: 1969 - 1970" (copy 1, copy 2)
Some Wikipedia Articles:
- 1965 in the United Kingdom.
- 1960s.
- History of the United Kingdom (1945–present).
- Social history of England: 1960s.
- Culture of the United Kingdom.
Wikipedia Articles, YouTube, etc. - Organized by Book Chapter
Chapter 1: In which our stage is set
- Winston Churchill (1874-1965).
- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).
- Modernism.
Modernist poetry in English. - These quotes from Chapter One summarize Bray's view of 1965 as a turning point:
"In life Churchill had liberated his people from the threat of tyranny. In death he would liberate them some more -- liberate them from what the novelist John Fowles was simultaneously calling 'the grotesquely elongated shadow . . . of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria'. Cultures do not change overnight, of course. Nonetheless, John Grigg's suggestion that Churchill's death 'relieves us of a psychological burden' was surely right. Churchill's passing licensed a whole vision of the past to pass too." (page 12)
"No less than Churchill's death, the passing of the high priest of high culture would license a revolution. In the months following, the modernism Eliot had helped invent was imported into the pop culture he had loathed. And that pop culture became part of the hight culture he loved. . . .
"History isn't, of course it isn't, the biography of great men. That doesn't mean, though, that the deaths of the likes of Winston Churchill and T.S. Eliot, the choice and master spirits of their age, don't reverberate through national life. . . . Consciously or not their countrymen registered the fact that the two guardians of the past were gone.
"The poet who died on 4 January 1965 detested the cultural world he had helped bring into being. And the statesman who died three weeks later had fought for the freedom of his country only to find himself more and more disapproving of what that freedom had led to and was being used for. Eliot and Churchill were men out of time. Now, though, they were out of it altogether -- and the nation that had for so long been dominated by their backward-looking fantasies turned their attention to the future.
"Right on cue, the future arrived. . . . A feeling of change [was] in the air. Over the next twelve months Britain would finally say goodbye to its fusty, crusty days-of-empire reveries and turn that feeling into fact." (pages 18-19)
Chapter 2: In which Britain gets surreal
- Surrealism.
- Comedians Peter Cook (1937-1995) and Dudley Moore (1935–2002) bring surrealism to the masses in the television program Not Only... But Also.
Search YouTube for not only but also. - Repulsion, a film directed by Roman Polanski (b.1933) and starring Catherine Deneuve (b.1943).
Chapter 3: In which painters, writers and filmmakers lay the ground for Britain's feminist revolution
- Bridget Riley (b.1931).
Op art.
Search Google Images for Bridget Riley.
Bridget Riley at Artsy: artist information and purchase works by Bridget Riley. - Ariel, a collection of poems by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963).
4. Sylvia Plath reads 'The Applicant'.
5. Sylvia Plath reads 'Lady Lazarus'.
6. Sylvia Plath reads 'Tulips'.
7. Sylvia Plath reads 'Cut'.
12. Sylvia Plath reads 'Ariel'.
20. Sylvia Plath reads 'A Birthday Present'.
24. Sylvia Plath reads 'Daddy'.
26. Sylvia Plath reads 'Fever 103'.
(Numbering above from 1965 edition.)
YouTube: Sylvia Plath reads from Ariel, part 1 of 3.
1. The Rabbit Catcher
2. A Birthday Present
3. A Secret
4. The Applicant
5. Daddy
YouTube: Sylvia Plath reads from Ariel, part 2 of 3.
1. Medusa
2. Stopped Dead
3. Fever 103°
4. Amnesiac
5. Cut
YouTube: Sylvia Plath reads from Ariel, part 3 of 3.
1. Ariel
2. Poppies in October
3. Nick and the Candlestick
4. Purdah
5. Lady Lazarus
YouTube: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Interview, 1961.
YouTube: Plath, Credo 3, 1975.
The 1962 interview with Peter Orr on Side B is available in another YouTube file.
YouTube: Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr, 1962, from Side B of Plath, Credo 3, 1975.
YouTube: Sylvia Plath reading her poetry, side A, Caedmon TC 1544, 1977.
(Recorded at the Poetry Room, Harvard College Library, 1958-1959.)
YouTube: Sylvia Plath reading her poetry, side B, Caedmon TC 1544, 1977.
(Recorded by BBC Records, 1960-1962.)
poetry works at sylviaplath.info.
Sylvia Plath at Faber & Faber.
Ariel: The Restored Edition, HarperCollins, 2004.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.] - The Magus, a novel by John Fowles (1926–2005).
- Darling, a film directed by John Schlesinger (1926–2003) and starring Julie Christie (b.1940).
- Elizabeth Lane (1905–1988), the first woman appointed to serve as a High Court judge.
Chapter 4: In which the car guns the motor of the Thatcher revolution
- Traffic in Towns.
The Buchanan Report, London: HMSO, 1963.
Traffic in Towns: The specially shortened edition of the Buchanan Report S228, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964. - Roads in the United Kingdom: 1950–1979.
- Beeching cuts (also called the Beeching Axe), reduction of the railway network.
- History of rail transport in Great Britain.
- Transport in the United Kingdom.
- Unsafe at Any Speed, a book by Ralph Nader (b.1934).
Chapter 5: In which pop goes modern, and classicism rediscovers melody
- Chichester Psalms, composed by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), performed at Chichester Cathedral July 1965.
Search YouTube for Chichester Psalms. - Bob Dylan (b.1941).
- Bringing It All Back Home, record by Bob Dylan, released March 1965, first side electric, second side acoustic.
- Electric Dylan controversy: earlier acoustic political folk music versus later electric rock n roll.
- Dont Look Back, a film by D. A. Pennebaker (b.1925) about Dylan's 1965 tour of England.
- Highway 61 Revisited, another record released by Bob Dylan in 1965.
Chapter 6: In which the establishment is disestablished -- but so are standards in schools
- Conservative Party (UK) leadership election, 1965.
After a long run of leaders from the aristocracy, the Conservative Party selects a leader of more modest origins to face Harold Wilson (1916-1995), Labour Prime Minister 1964-1970 and 1974-1976.
Edward Heath (1916-2005), Conservative Prime Minister 1970-1974.
Reginald Maudling (1917–1979). - First Wilson ministry: Education.
Circular 10/65.
Grammar schools debate.
Comprehensive school (England and Wales).
Chapter 7: In which sanity is challenged and the family falls apart
- The Divided Self, a book by psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927–1989), originally published in 1960 but which gained great attention when reprinted in paperback in 1965.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com.] - Kingsley Hall.
Mary Barnes (1923-2001).
Chapter 8: In which our heroes find Queen and Country wanting
- First Wilson ministry: External affairs.
- Sword of Honour trilogy, novels by Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966). Spies and Secret Agents: Novels, Films, Television
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 1963 novel by John le Carré (b.1931); 1965 film starring Richard Burton (1925–1984).
- The IPCRESS File, 1962 novel by Len Deighton (b.1929); 1965 film starring Michael Caine (b.1933).
- Thunderball, 1961 novel by Ian Fleming (1908–1964); 1965 film starring Sean Connery (b.1930).
- The Avengers, 1961-1969.
In 1965 Diana Rigg (b.1938) was cast as Emma Peel; plots started to include surrealist elements.
Chapter 9: In which the censors cannot hold
- Saved, a play by Edward Bond (b.1934), is censored by the Lord Chamberlain. This will contribute to the eventual abolition of theatre censorship by the Theatres Act 1968.
- Mary Whitehouse (1910-2001) and the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVALA) campaign for the censorship of television, radio, films, etc.
- Up the Junction, story by Nell Dunn (b.1936), television adaptation directed by Ken Loach (b.1936); broadcast on BBC1 in November 1965.
Controversy over Up the Junction's depiction of abortion contributes to the ongoing debate that results in the legalisation of abortion by the Abortion Act 1967.
YouTube: Up the Junction (1965). - Moors murders, modern Britain's first experience with serial killers, who were arrested in October 1965.
The murderers' interest in Nazis and the literature of violence (for example de Sade's Justine) becomes fodder for the censorship debate. - Censorship in the United Kingdom.
Chapter 10: In which the new great and good are set before the nation
- Stand Up, Nigel Barton a play by Dennis Potter (1935–1994), broadcast on BBC1 in The Wednesday Play series in December 1965.
YouTube: Stand Up, Nigel Barton (1965).
YouTube: Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton (1965). - Box of Pin-Ups, a collection of photographs of celebrities by David Bailey (b.1938).
Search Google Images for David Bailey Box of Pin-Ups 1964. - Blowup, a film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007).
- Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Revised Edition, Columbia University Press, 2002.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
Hitchcock's Films was first published in 1965 and was an early advocate (in the English speaking world) for the auteur theory of film making. - The James Bond Dossier (1965), a book by Kingsley Amis (1922–1995).
[Google Books; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com.] - The Beatles.
Rubber Soul, a record by The Beatles released December 1965.
Epilogue: In which today comes into view
- Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965.
- Race Relations Act 1965.
- Sexual Offences Act 1967 (decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have attained the age of 21).
- Abortion Act 1967.
- Theatres Act 1968.
- Matrimonial Causes Act 1973.
- Roy Jenkins (1920-2003), Home Secretary 1965–1967 and 1974-1976.