I was born in 1960, at the very start of that decade of change. I am part of what is sometimes called Generation Jones, essentially a Boomer, but too young to have dropped acid in the 1960s, and too old to be part of Generation X. I am therefore one of those people whose ’60s were really the ’70s, and for most of my life I have thought this meant I got the worst of both worlds. It was common, among my cohort, to feel that we had missed the good stuff. There was a sense something incredible had passed and that we would never see anything like it again.

Now, I’m not so sure. Andy Beckett argues in When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies that ‘for many politicised Britons, the decade was not the hangover after the Sixties; it was the point when the great Sixties party actually started’. Historian Michelle Arrow makes a similar point in her book about ’70s Australia, The Seventies. She says it was a time when ‘movements reshaped our social norms and our political culture, even if their impact was partial and uneven’.