David Edgar’s plays include The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Playing with Fire and, most recently, Testing the Echo. He is working on a book about playwriting.
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Vol. 29 No. 11 · 7 June 2007
pages 21-23 | 3944 words
Much like the 1950s
David Edgar
- BuyWhite Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties by Dominic Sandbrook
Little, Brown, 878 pp, £22.50, August 2006, ISBN 0 316 72452 1
- BuyNever Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles by Dominic Sandbrook
Abacus, 892 pp, £19.99, May 2006, ISBN 0 349 11530 3
Early in 1982, at the nadir of the fortunes of the first Thatcher government, a number of ministers sought to identify the causes of the riots that had erupted in British cities the previous summer. On 27 March, the prime minister herself blamed events in Brixton and Toxteth not on economic or political forces but on a decade. ‘We are reaping what was sown in the 1960s,’ she announced. ‘Fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which the old virtues of discipline and self-restraint were denigrated.’
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 13 · 5 July 2007
From Dominic Sandbrook
I thoroughly enjoyed David Edgar’s review of my books Never Had It So Good and White Heat, not least because my prejudices against chunky knitwear, Jean-Paul Sartre and the New Left evidently annoyed him so much (LRB, 7 June). But he is wrong to write that I dismissed Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement as an ‘IRA plot’. The truth is rather more complicated. As Richard English shows in Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, the initial impetus for setting up the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association came from a small group of republican intellectuals in the Wolfe Tone Societies, which had been established in 1964 with the explicit intention of fostering ‘republicanism by educating the masses in their cultural and political heritage’. Gerry Adams himself has written that the civil rights movement was ‘the creation of the republican leadership’, but this was not the whole story: as I put it in my book, the movement was ‘more than simply a front for the IRA’. A grass-roots Campaign for Social Justice had been set up before the Wolfe Tone Societies set to work. And in any case, thousands of people who had nothing to do with the IRA had joined the movement by the late 1960s because they were sick of anti-Catholic discrimination. Initially conceived as a Trojan horse for militant republicanism, the civil rights movement ended up being nothing of the kind.
Dominic Sandbrook
Oxford
