Author's note and acknowledgements
The precise definition of a baby boomer is disputed, but I have defined it as anyone born between 1945 and 1955. David Willetts in his book The Pinch defines it very differently, as people born between 1945 and 1965, but he is quite wrong, because this period contains not one but two baby booms, separated by a small slump. The classic baby boomers, born between 1945 and 1955, were a completely different sort of generation from those born at the start of the sixties.
The complaint may be made that I have not written an objective history of the sixties, but have selected those events and quotes that bear out my thesis. I have a ready answer to this, which is: yup, that's what I've done.
I have told the story of the baby boomer generation partly through the lives of individuals. Among many others, I have made use of the lives of the only two baby boomer Prime Ministers Britain has ever had, or is ever likely to have, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown; of the singer Marianne Faithfull, whose autobiography Faithfull is full of insights into what the children of the sixties thought they were, and what they really were; of the student-Trotskyist-turned-far-right-commentator Peter Hitchens and of Paul Mackney, student Trotskyist who kept the faith and became an important and successful trade union leader; and of Greg Dyke, representing that part of the baby boomer generation which made a fortune in business, in a peculiarly sixties way. I'm particularly grateful to three of them – Greg Dyke, Peter Hitchens and Paul Mackney – for long and illuminating interviews; and to Gordon Brown for an interview while I was writing his biography, which has helped me here too.
Other baby boomers make occasional appearances, and some of them have been kind enough to read and comment on certain passages and chapters, or to help with information. They include Eddie Barrett and Tony Russell, who between them – or so it seems to me – know everything there is to know about popular music (and this book was completed in Eddie Barrett's charming house in Calabria, looking out at islands and mountains). They also include the playwright Steve Gooch, and old university friends who were especially helpful on 1968: Mike Brereton, Malcolm Clarke, Marshall Colman, John Howkins, Marina Lewycka, Linden West and Martin Yarnit.
I also want to thank the readers of U3A News, the magazine of the University of the Third Age, and the best place in the world for anyone writing about events in the last fifty years or so to find people who will remember them.
Among the generation betrayed by the baby boomers, I would like to thank in particular two Leeds University graduates in their twenties for information and insights: my son Peter Beckett, now a political lobbyist, and the former National Union of Students president Kat Fletcher.
