Many of the titles on my bookshelves deal with what could be termed contemporary history, and this project sprang out of the process of reading and reflecting on those volumes. I don’t pretend to be an expert on these subjects, and in many cases my understanding is superficial, but I’ve launched onto this chronological examination of themes and events over the past sixty years as a way of sorting these things in my own mind. I’ve also tried to put them into a wider context, the collapse of the five Cs that I see as characterising the society in which I grew up.
None of the chapters are finished. In all likelihood, none will be, but I’ve adopted the technique that stood me in good stead in my student days to make a start and as I find something that relates to what’s there the article will be modified in the light of what I’ve just run across.
At the time my practice of writing a shorter argument outlining what I wanted to say and padding it out with quotations, references and footnotes was aimed at obtaining the maximum result from the amount of effort I was expending but I can’t see why that approach can’t work in this environment as well.
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(as a PDF) Interesting Times Part 1
(as an ePub) Interesting Times Part 1