Ian Jack

Of recent decades, the 1970s is the most reviled. I once had a colleague who'd been a little girl in the 1970s, and not a particularly poor one, yet she would shudder and say: ‘Oh, it was like Eastern Europe then, all stews and root vegetables and wet holidays in caravans.' Her austere picture didn't fit with my own memories, but it remains a popular view.

Of the two leading rivals for the London mayoralty, Ken Livingstone is much the more difficult to imagine as a child. Nobody, surely, can have that problem with Boris Johnson. The mind’s eye sees Boris as one of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, a bouncy fellow demanding his tea and laying plans ‘to be/the next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong, and it may be that the reason we can readily conceive Johnson aged seven is that the public persona of Johnson aged 47 is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys.

In March​ this year the Daily Express sold an average of 488,246 copies a day. In 1945 it averaged 3.3 million copies – a figure that went on rising until it peaked in 1961 at 4.3 million. The Daily Mirror eventually overtook it (selling an average of five million copies in 1964), but for a time the Express was the biggest-selling newspaper in the world. There was a crackle and dazzle...

Thanks to​ my older brother, I was an Observer reader as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee....

Brexit voters can’t be divided into two – Hannanites on one side and Faragists on the other. The voter who was impressed by the financial argument – Vote Leave’s extra £350 million a week for the NHS – wasn’t necessarily tut-tutting at Ukip’s stance on refugees and immigration. In my experience, he was shouting his agreement. Too many headscarves in the high street, too much money sent to Brussels, the Empire, St Crispin’s Day.