White Heat

Currently reading White Heat by Dominic Sandbrook, the follow up to his highly regarded Never Had it So Good. both are detailed social and political histories of Britain (and, in fact, mostly England at that) during a short space of time: 1956-63 for the first one and 1964-70 for the second.

Both books are good, excellent on politics, particularly on the thoughts and personalities of the politicians concerned, through a judicious mix of whitehall documents and MPs diaries. They also like to do a bit of soft revisionism: ie Douglas-Home was quite good and a bit more ambitious than previously thought; and Harold Wilson's government was pretty poor from quite early on, especially in financial matters (even if a lot of it was Reggie Maudling's fault). But both books are I think a bit weak on culture; the author spends a lot of time writing about the Beatles, or New Wave, and drops in mentions of sundry other cultural icons, but you never really get the feeling he is that keen on it. The stuff about New Wave theatre and film in the first book was particularly vaguely thought out. He wrote a lot of it off as inferior to anything other countries had to offer (and thereby seeming to hint at a cultural decline), while almost completely ignoring the amazing contribution to culture that British tv made from 1953 onwards. Sure, Doctor Who got one or two mentions, and does in the second book, but not as part of an overall understanding that Britain has had, for 50 or so years, a televisual culture to rival or surpass any. Dramas and concepts like The Wednesday Play or 1954s Nineteen Eighty Four, Coronation Street, and later Made in Britain and Threads, stand comparison as art with many many films of the past 50 years, and it is silly to patronise this achievement as just being for tv, or to ignore it on that basis.

I'm not necessarily accusing Sandbrook of this - but it occurred to me reading his books - many critics seem to be in love with grand gestures, sweeping films, existentialist philosophy; things that glory in deliberate complexity. (I think AN Wilson is often guilty of this) It means that works of great art in their own right - like some of Kingsley Amis - are dismissed because they appear, in comparison with the great themes, to be trivial. But they are of course, the great themes in microcosm and in symbol form. And British culture has often specialised in the ironic, the trivial, the sardonic and the deflating. This is all the more so, since the war, for probably obvious reasons.

Sandbrook is very keen on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, which may seem to disprove my point. But there was a vast amount more to 60s music than these guys, which he only really touches upon. Perhaps for reasons of space.

I am also not sure about his habit, especially marked in the first book, to discuss (say) public concerns about crime, and then dismiss them with a vague "the rise in crime had already started" or something. It seems, occasionally, that things do not quite fit into the vision he has, so they need to be squeezed out. The Cuban Missile Crisis is given fairly short shrift in the first book, compared to the detail that Peter Hennessy gives to it in his book The Prime Minister; Sandbrook totally plays down the significance of the British government's role and of the incident itself in the British consciousness. Fair enough. That is his view.

I don't want to seem nit-picking or critical because I really do like the books and he has a very easy style. They cover a vast amount of ground in a remarkably unbiased way (compared to a lot of postwar histories I've read) and deserve a wide readership.