It is generally agreed that something happened to the culture in the 1960s. Immediately during the post-war period, higher education was still in the hands of the mandarin classes and deference was paid to their superior knowledge and authority. There was even a popular advertising poster of the 1950s which read “Top People take The Times” showing men in formal dress.
I make this comment as I have just been reading the first novel of a young member of this mandarin class, published in 1951. Tillotson by Philip Trower, who died aged 95 in January this year and about whom I have subsequently blogged, is available on Amazon and is worth resurrecting, partly because it is an elegant and accomplished piece of writing for a young man in his twenties and partly because it assumes an educated and cultured readership. It is thus dated, with echoes of EM Forster – especially as it is set in an invented country somewhere in “the Levant” – and the high-minded frivolity of the Bloomsbury Group.
