Postwar

In a representative outburst, Osborne writes of British royalty as ‘the gold filling in a mouthful of decay’.

152

Godard in particular had decidedly eclectic tastes. He is reported to have been ‘mesmerized’ by Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) starring Joan Crawford.

153

Italians could certainly design cars, as any motor racing enthusiast would confirm. It was Italian coach-builders who first removed mudguards, running boards and other redundant excrescences from small family cars—much as Milanese tailors in the same years were eliminating trouser turn-ups and inventing the sharp, clean lines and cut of the modern Italian suit. What Italian car manufacturers appeared unable to do with any consistency was build the cars that their draughtsmen had imagined.

154

In the admiring commentary of one Parisian critic the thousands of identical apartments squeezed into the new grands ensembles were ‘veritable tiny houses incorporated into a vertical structure, like so many different bottles in the same wine rack.’ See Pierre Agard, ‘L’Unite de residence’ in Esprit, October-November 1953. I am grateful to Dr Nicole Rudolph for the reference.

155

But contrast Rotterdam: gutted by German bombs and rebuilt in stages through the following decades, the Dutch port was a consciously and genuinely ‘designed’ city.

156

Obviously this did not apply to small, elite academies like France’s Ecole Polytechnique, or Ecole Normale Superieure, which admitted their few students by a rigorous selective exam and then taught them very well indeed. But these were unusual and highly atypical.

157

In the mid-1960s only 44 percent of Italian university students graduated; these figures were to deteriorate still further in the course of the 1970s.

158

In the Communist bloc ‘the Sixties’ as pop culture were of necessity experienced at second-hand. But this difference should not be exaggerated. To apply the Ur-reference of the age: everyone in Eastern Europe knew who the Beatles were and many people had heard their music. And not just the Beatles: when the French rock star Johnny Hallyday performed in the small town of Kosice in Slovakia, in 1966, 24,000 people turned out to hear him.

159

The Beatles came from the Liverpool working class—or, in the case of Paul McCartney, from a notch or two above. The other iconic rock band of the Sixties, the Rolling Stones, was more conventionally bohemian in its subject matter, as befitted its members’ middle-class London background. This handicap was overcome by a calculated roughness of style and by the Stones’ well-publicized and ostentatiously raunchy private lives.

160

Note, though, that for most of the Sixties it was still forbidden in many parts of Western and Eastern Europe alike to dispense information about contraception. Britain was exceptional in approving the contraceptive pill for use in 1961—across the Channel the singer Antoine sold a million records in 1966 plaintively imagining a France where the Pill would one day ‘be sold in Monoprix stores’.

161

There was a time lag in the farther-flung provinces, however, where black berets, cloth caps and even women’s bonnets were still in daily use. For a little while longer, headgear remained a reliable traditional indicator of regional origin and social class.

162

It was also to evolve with little difficulty into the skinhead attire of the following decade.

163