Can’t get no satisfaction

The Sixties, that recidivist naughty schoolboy, is in the dock again. And this time the charge sheet is longer than usual.

"For too long the Sixties has been a sacred zone," writes Gerard DeGroot, professor of modern history at St Andrew's University, in The 60s Unplugged. "Cast aside the rose-tinted spectacles and we see mindless mayhem, shallow commercialism and unbridled cruelty." While the decade brought "flowers, music, love and good times... It also brought hatred, murder, greed, dangerous drugs, needless deaths, ethnic cleansing, neo-colonialist exploitation, sound-bite politics, sensationalism, a warped sense of equality, a bizarre notion of freedom, the decline of liberalism and the end of innocence."

Wow. Even if one accepts that hatred, murder and greed

barely existed before the Sixties, that's still quite a case to answer. The big problem is that, far from being a 'sacred zone', the Sixties, like 'political correctness', has long been the refuge of the lazy commentator short of an idea. Barely a week passes without some sad sack in the Mail venting about it and its supposedly baleful legacy. What's to demystify?

DeGroot's intention was to look over the top of those mythical rose-tinted specs at the whole decade so there are chapters on the Six Day War and Biafra and a welcome nod to Cesar Chavez and the farm-labourers of California, as well as the usual riffs on Woodstock and Weathermen, Beatles and Berkeley. He's right to suggest that 'sexual liberation' often exploited women, that drugs caused casualties and much self-important tosh was spoken and written,