Kynaston’s impressive history of Britain comes to the year 1962, when Harold Macmillan pulled out the long knives and the Beatles released ‘Love Me Do’
In Whitehall, prime minister Harold Macmillan unexpectedly sacked a third of his cabinet; in a North Cheam pub, the Rolling Stones performed to a paying audience of two; in Barrow-in-Furness, Nella Last, after a lunch of “soup, salad, ham & the last bit of chicken”, had to call the television rental shop when her set wouldn’t “hold” ITV. And so David Kynaston’s determinedly democratic take on Britain’s postwar history rolls into the summer of 1962 with, as ever, large and portentous events jostling with the quotidian details of life to conjure a snapshot of an era.
On the Cusp marks the halfway point of Kynaston’s multi-volume Tales of a New Jerusalem sequence, which opened with VE Day 1945 and has an ultimate destination of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 general election win. The books so far have dealt in chunks of between two and five years each, but here Kynaston changes pace to focus on the few months leading up to 5 October 1962 – the day the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do”, and the first James Bond film, Dr No, came out – which, he claims, marks the transition between the old world and the “real” 1960s. As additional evidence he also cites a blizzard of other events and trends garnered from national and local newspapers and magazines, official reports and archives, snippets of high and low culture, sports reports, academic studies and, especially, the diaries and memoirs of the famous and less famous alike.