A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s

What Jonathan Miller, one of its high priests, calls a "peculiar episode in British cultural history" provides rich material for Carpenter to dig into. He explores the creeping postwar unease, fast-growing consumerism, and other social factors of the early 1960s that set the stage for the explosion of "a new ... characteristically English style of subversion" that took the form of the most silly social and political commentary. Carpenter, also a biographer of Tolkien, Auden, Pound, and others, traces the people who fed England's sudden appetite for satire, including Miller, Michael Frayn, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett. The edition includes eight pages of crisp b&w photos. Originally published in London in 2000 as That was satire that was (Victor Gollancz). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)