‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ So begins Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’. It is a precise summary of this book’s thesis.

Modern Britain was built by the baby-boomers: the generation born between 1945 and 1955, who grew up in the Sixties and whose lives were shaped by the visionary reforms that followed the end of the Second World War.

The baby-boomers were the generation who profited most from the massive postwar extension of state investment in health, education and social welfare. They experienced – and made – radical changes to Britain’s attitudes towards sex, money, race, class, food, music, politics and power. By all accounts, they had