Marking the mid-point in his landmark history of modern Britain, David Kynaston presents a scintillating snapshot of the year 1962 – one of the most fascinating periods of transition in British history
David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951 and has been a professional historian since 1973. His four-volume history of the City of London was published between 1994 and 2001, and more recently he has written Till Time’s Last Sand, a history of the Bank of England. His continuing history of post-war Britain, 'Tales of a New Jerusalem', has so far comprised Austerity Britain, Family Britain and Modernity Britain. His most recent three books have been Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket (with Stephen Fay); Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem (with Francis Green); and Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times.
For me the best book this year was David Kynaston's glorious On the
Cusp ... It’s rare to read anything so teeming with life - so many
diverse voices offering their own glimpse of a world which, as
Kynaston convincingly argues, was changing more dramatically than
ever before or since. Many people have written about this period
between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP,
but few have given such a rich sense of living through it
*Spectator, Books of the Year*
This is Kynaston at his best. A thousand glimpses of British life
in 1962 produce a rich and vivid picture of a nation in all its
human complexity, standing at the edge of great change. Beautifully
woven, it yields surprises and fresh insights on every page – and
in my case a blizzard of memories
*Ian Jack*
A compulsive read. He is such a fine historian and sociologist,
with an eye and ear for the unexpected, and a sharp sense of humour
that makes the reader laugh aloud. It’s generous as well as sharp.
For me, it was like reliving some of the most exciting and hopeful
months of my life, an illuminating exploration of an important
stretch of time.
*Margaret Drabble*
'Tales of a New Jerusalem' has already established itself as the
definitive history of post-war Britain. This latest instalment has
all the eye-catching detail and informed synthesis that Kynaston's
admirers have come to expect. I was captivated by its
brilliance
*D. J. Taylor*
A fascinating crystal of time, Kynaston's superb evocation of
Britain ... sparkles with voices from a vanished world ... An
entrancing representation, full of exquisite detail and
unforgettable voices, On the Cusp invites us in, to the real lives
behind historical trends, a door to Britain on the brink of great
change
*Kate Williams*
What a joy it has been to find myself wholly immersed in the
richness of Kynaston’s account of those few amazing,
ground-shifting months, just before we were all tipped into the
drama of the 1960s proper. There is something hugely,
hindsightingly thrilling in reading about the early seed-sowing of
a story whose outcome we know so well
*Juliet Nicolson*
With his eagle eye, Kynaston selects details and incidents that
serve as emblems of larger shifts in the zeitgeist ... He is a
wonderfully diligent chronicler of the changing face of popular
culture at the time ... Kynaston is a master at mixing key
political and social movements with the more humdrum details of
everyday life
*Mail on Sunday*
David Kynaston continues his magnificent series on postwar British
society with On the Cusp, a riveting study of four pivotal summer
months ... Kynaston is a master of popular culture ... But what
Kynaston captures again and again - and this is what gives his book
such importance - is the conscious, almost fanatical desire by
those in authority at the time to dismantle, literally, evidence of
the past
*Sunday Telegraph*
Kynaston skilfully uses private diaries, archives, memoirs, social
surveys, newspapers and magazines to give the flavour of the period
and what people were thinking not just in Westminster and Whitehall
but in, for example, Birmingham, Manchester, Barrow-in-Furness,
Keighley, Bournemouth and Llanfrothen in north Wales ...
Absorbing
*New Statesman*
It has all the characteristic hallmarks of [Kynaston's] writing:
vivid pointillist detail, an extraordinary range of sources and
penetrating analysis of evidence ... Kynaston is a master of
minutiae and the great joy of his book is to be found in fragments,
anecdotes and vignettes
*Literary Review*
Excellent
*Choice Magazine*
Kynaston’s impressive history of Britain comes to the year 1962 …
His ongoing achievement – aside from managing the prodigious
quantities of material – is to convince his readers, who know well
what comes next, of real lives being lived in near real time, and
of a future as unwritten then as ours is today
*Guardian*
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