Bob Dylan and Eric Hobsbawm

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I could quote all day from David Kynaston’s magnificent series of books about Britain post-1945, Tales Of A New Jerusalem - mostly just a lot of did-you-know stuff, amazing facts and figures, anecdotes, glimpses of a faraway country which has shaped anyone who was born in our benighted, dark, wet island. There are five in the sequence so far, and I have read them all, a total of three thousand, three hundred and thirty-six pages. The latest is called A Northern Wind, and covers 1962-1965; the northern wind is blown mostly by the Beatles and Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister from Yorkshire elected in 1964. Did you know that 3.5 per cent of English people had access to central heating in 1963 (60% in the US, 90% in Sweden)? Did you know that four million households in the UK were without bathrooms?

Kynaston is curious about everything, which is what makes the books so rich. If you’re not interested in town planning or housing policy, then there will be something about the Profumo scandal, or the Arctic weather of 1963, or the British satire boom along in a minute. He is engaged by sport, politics, literature. And one of the things that struck me about A Northern Wind, the first book in the sequence to engage with rock and pop music seriously (because the UK made very little contribution before ‘63), is how wrong the intelligentsia of the age got it.