ABSTRACT
‘Sexual intercourse’, according to some famous lines by the poet Philip Larkin, ‘began/In nineteen sixty-three & Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles first LP’ (Larkin, 1988, p.167). Thirty years later – as the essays in this volume and its companion were being written – the sixties were back in vogue. For some they were back as nostalgia, expressed through increasing numbers of journalistic or televisual retrospectives looking back to the ‘swinging decade’, when post-war austerity finally gave way to sixties affluence, when education and opportunity both seemed set to expand indefinitely, when the stuffy establishment restraints of the fifties gave way to liberation and the liberalization of personal morality, when for a moment British pop music could take the American charts by storm, and England won the World Cup. For others, the sixties were back as a scapegoat, as a convenient explanation and whipping boy for all the discontents, declines and dilemmas of the ensuing decades, as the origin of the ‘permissiveness’ that led inexorably to moral decline, to the collapse of ‘family values’, to soaring crime, abortion and divorce rates, and to moral chaos.
