History has its moments of euphoria when people embrace in the streets out of sheer love for their neighbours, police horses are garlanded with flowers, and everyone understands that the old lies and repression are gone for ever. I'm not sure that these moments occur in Britain. Certainly they didn't in the Australia where I grew up in the 1950s, and as a result I'm always bemused when I hear them spoken about: do such things really happen in the world beyond? I'll never know because I always missed the moment. Khrushchev's Thaw was over by the time I got to the Soviet Union, leaving only the post-euphoria hangover. I could have been in Paris in the summer of 1968 but stayed in Oxford instead, writing my thesis. Then I went to America, but it was already the early 1970s, and people were turning 30 and taking the flowers out of their hair.

LRB 10 September 2009 | PDF Download