The Sixties

The Sixties

Jenny Diski, Profile Books, 2010

Much has been written about the Sixties: tributes to music and fashion, sex, drugs and revolution. Diski’s memoir, The Sixties, breaks the mould, wryly dismantling the big ideas that dominated the era – permissiveness, liberation and self-invention – to consider what Diski and her generation were really up to. Did they take drugs to get by, or to see the world differently? How responsible were they for the self-interest and greed of the Eighties? Diski takes a witty, incisive look at the radical beliefs to which her generation subscribed, little realising they were often old ideas dressed up in new forms. She considers whether she and her peers were as serious as they thought about changing the world; if the hedonistic Sixties were funded by the baby-boomers’ parents; and if the decade’s big idea was that it really meant something to be young.