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Lead book review

Corrie and ready-salted crisps: the years when modern Britain began

A review of A Shake of the Dice: Modernity Britain 1959 – 62, by David Kynaston. A formidable and intimate history of four remarkable years

13 September 2014

9:00 AM

13 September 2014

9:00 AM

A Shake of the Dice: Modernity Britain 1959—62 David Kynaston

Bloomsbury, pp.459, £25, ISBN: 978408844397

In Burberry’s on Regent Street on a dank December day in 1959, David Kynaston records, ‘a young Canadian writer, Leonard Cohen […] bought a not-yet-famous blue raincoat’. For those joining Kynaston’s groaning historical wagon train for the first time, this is a sample of the sort of thing with which it abounds.

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