"Few eras have captured the imagination quite like the Sixties. Fuelled by growing prosperity, optimism and sheer youthful cheek, it was overwhelmingly a period of change - in politics, music and arts, but most of all in attitudes. For a generation brought up on post-war idealism everything seemed possible for those who questioned the status quo: from the Beatles to satire, mini-skirts, John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps, the legalization of homosexuality and abortion, the Pill, the Civil Rights victories in the United States, England winning the World Cup, flower power, and on to the first man on the Moon. " "Equally there was the darker side: the massacre at Sharpeville, the escalating war in Vietnam, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Moors murders, the Six Day War, the extinguishing of the Prague spring by Warsaw Pact tanks, the disaster of Aberfan. " "A time of startling news stories and fascinating cultural shifts, it was, fittingly, perhaps, in the last decade when the words usually arrived before the television pictures, also an era of great writing. "--Jacket.