Healers: A History of American Medicine - John Duffy - Paperback - Illini Books ed Book

It wasn't until months after buying this and its sequel White Heat in autumn 2012 that I found out the author was a Tory; already slightly regretting the purchase of these huge tomes, I was even less keen after that but still wanted to read about the era in detail. Always alert for right-wing bias whilst reading the book, I was usually pleasantly surprised - for example Sandbrook's assessment of contentious issues like immigration, trade unions and the EEC was even-handed if not actually leaning to the left and he presented many statistics and arguments in favour of them (at the time). He made Harold Macmillan incredibly likeable; I already knew of him as probably the most progressive Conservative PM we've ever had but knew little about him as a person.

A few other biases were, however, present. Sandbrook evidently dislikes CND folkies, Tony Benn and perhaps most oddly and vehemently, the novelist Colin Macinnes. Macinnes comes in for much stick for being a posh class tourist and for exoticising and positive-stereotyping West Indian immigrants.
(I read Macinnes' Absolute Beginners before finishing this book and what it seems to me to show is a stage in the evolution of attitudes: as well as an enduring crush on a white girl who mostly sleeps with black men, the late-teens narrator has genuine friendships with black and Jewish people; they are individual people to him, and he is prepared to be injured when standing up to racist thugs on their behalf. It's just that he can't stop mentioning his friends' races, which seems like a legacy of pre-Second World War essentialism.)
Given some of Sandbrook's own mildly questionable vocab choices (though generally fair and liberal attitude) when discussing immigrant people, I'd guess that he borrowed the "exoticising" criticism from somewhere else as extra ammo against a writer he already disliked and whose work probably can't be ignored when discussing social change in late 50s and early 60s Britain. He also doesn't appear entirely comfortable with gay men; their legal and social situation gets a few pages within the section on spies, after the story of Burgess and Maclean (the chapter later devotes 20 pages to Ian Fleming's works alone) and, invariably referring to them as homosexuals, he reports media slurs of the day in a sort of free indirect style, sounding not so much academically detached as perhaps slightly in agreement.

With big books, even when they have problems like that (or the excessively detailed chapter on the succession of Alec Douglas-Home) there can be so much right with them in the other 650-odd pages that without notes it's easy to forget the flaws. And this, generally, is readable and marvellously comprehensive. Often reading two pages made me feel as if I'd read at least ten, so dense is the information. When I knew subjects reasonably well - British New Wave films and pop music - he did seem a little obvious in presentation with one or two good bits missed out; still I always learned something I didn't already know, and you can't include absolutely everything, even in a book this size. Those chapters served as a barometer and I was confident that this was generally a very good and comprehensive overview of politics, culture and society of the time, albeit one focused on England rather than "Britain".

Sandbrook's general take on the time is about continuity more than change: most people were "squares", and many trends had already appeared in the 1930s only to be interrupted by the war and rationing. I became very aware of reading a historian from the same generation as myself: all the same basic concepts are here which reflect what I was taught, most of which I still like to apply: everything is multifactorial and the product of numerous social, cultural and political currents; individuals can be very interesting but in the greater scheme of things they have relatively little power; there is the scrupulousness not to generalise too much without stats, especially when something is particularly novel; and a scepticism about being presented with big sweeping theories.

Whilst it has some imperfections, this is a great summation of many of the features and preoccupations of the era including new consumer goods and materialism, trade unions, the old-school-tie Establishment, the satire boom, spies both real and fictional, increased homophobia, the rise of television, the Keeler affair, immigration from the Carribbean and the Indian subcontinent, the satire boom, rock n roll, trad jazz and the Beatles, well-paid working class youngsters, the decline of Empire and failure to keep up with Western Europe in modernising industry. And the post-war Butskellite consensus, which for those of us with social-democratic inclinations, seems like the best British party politics has ever been. A time when “Britain was being steered into decline by a group of complacent, snobbish, weary, anachronistic old men” at the same time as work and welfare were easy to find, and cultural and social change was chomping at the bit.