‘You don’t understand,’ an American history professor once said to me of the 1960s, wagging an avuncular finger. ‘You had to be there.’ Coming from somebody who had spent his life studying the nineteenth century, it seemed a particularly silly thing to say. But then, as Gerard DeGroot points out in a thoughtful introduction to his new book, there are many people for whom the myth of the Sixties has become ‘something sacred’, a totem of high-minded idealism regularly invoked as a reprimand to our own supposedly cynical age. ‘In no other period of history’, he writes, ‘has canon been allowed so freely to permeate analysis.’ 

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