Stuart Coop

I mean, we've got, you know, Nixon has come into the White House, the Cold War, we've got, you know, Vietnam is still, you know, looming very, very large for that entire generation.

The civil rights, you know, and you don't come along thinking that, you know, America was a peace, love and happiness country at that particular time.

You know, yes, we plonked someone on the moon and that was, you know, let's wave a flag and everything's really good.

You know, we're going off to the new frontiers.

Right.

It wasn't long before Altamont, which is considered by many people to be the end of the 1960s.

This is the year of Charles Manson.

This is the year of the Tate murders.

I've always loved Joan Didion's essay, The White Album, and the piece that I read it soon after it came out, but it still sticks with me.

The way she talks about

that the news was filtering through Los Angeles about the Manson murders.

And she talks about how there were speculations that, you know, there were 10 people, 20 people, 30 people, that there were black people involved.

There was all this stuff.

And then the killer line, you know, is that what struck her was that nobody was surprised, you know.

And that, to me, encapsulates the real sense that in 1969, whilst we had Woodstock and Woodstock, despite, you know, the weather, was a wonderful experience...

that, you know, America wasn't a happy place.

And I think we look back at that era sometimes, you know, and we are now, you know, it's 50 years since Woodstock, with some slightly rose-coloured glasses, you know, and it's interesting that...

And this, I've missed some things.

I mean, there are not too many fiction books that have really sort of had their jumping off point being peace, love and happiness and goodwill to everybody.

The really lasting and defining fiction, and for me, a lot of the great nonfiction that...