Am I being an old curmudgeon or am I right to feel completely cheated and confused when I pick up a book called The Sixties only to find, within the first few pages, that the author didn’t mean the Sixties at all? ‘The Sixties, of course, were not the decade of the same name. They began in the mid-sixties … and ended in the mid-1970s,’ writes Jenny Diski, the author of the latest in Profile’s Big Ideas series. 

Excuse me. Says who? I was actually there. While Jenny Diski was thirteen in 1960, I was sixteen, had already left school and was going to go to art school, write my first book (published in 1966), and follow it up by becoming rock correspondent for the Daily Mail.