At the beginning if the nineteen-fifties I was a pre-school toddler. At their end I was a rebellious teenager - I was formed by the fifties. By coincidence the author of this wonderful book was about the same age - I suspect that I'm the elder by just a few months. There were moments of shared nostalgia which made the book particularly endearing to me, but, make no mistake, this is not a nostalgic look back at a momentous decade, but a work of masterly scholarship.