Deep into the Sixties is as thrilling as ever – a funny, sad, moving portrait of a country struggling to come to terms with its destiny . . . Disarmingly poetic . . . The breadth of Kynaston's knowledge and curiosity keeps the narrative buoyant. Wonderful details abound

Craig Brown, SUNDAY TIMES

In the compelling double vision of David Kynaston's ongoing chronicle of Britain, we are now in the mid-1960s . . . Kynaston is always alive to ambivalence, understands that in the realm of feeling not much is (as it were) black and white . . . His essential quality is decency, almost a gentleness in the way he makes his points without grandstanding, his grasp of the issues absolute yet his judgments tentative . . . Deep into the Sixties is packed full of amazing information, seamless in its stitching and faultless in the telling

Anthony Quinn, OBSERVER

David Kynaston doesn't underplay the excitements of the period. But he rightly emphasises that the rotten old 50s – patriarchal, homophobic, class-divided and bigoted – wouldn't just fade away . . . No living historian is as comprehensive . . . full of humour and never dull . . . The last section of the book is a tour de force . . . “I retreat upstairs to my bedroom and play a side of a Nancy Sinatra album, reckoning it will see both me and England through.” It did. The match was a triumph and so is the book

Blake Morrison, GUARDIAN, Book of the Day

Richly evokes the texture of a decade that was often dubbed “swinging” – but was, for many, a time of unsettling change and death of tradition . . . Bring[s] to life, almost moment by moment, two years of dramatic social and cultural change that in many parts of the UK was “only just starting to happen, and perhaps in some places not even that”. Britain exported sexy bands, actors and fashions. But at home, the optimism about Harold Wilson's Labour government was wearing off. Employment was high but everything was getting more expensive . . . For the most part, chapters take the form of immersive, chronological accounts of everything that was happening everywhere. Political events run alongside entries from ordinary people's diaries, childhood reminiscences by artists and writers such as Viv Albertine, Hanif Kureishi, Derek Jarman and Malorie Blackman . . . Kynaston's triumph is to so thoroughly achieve the same effect that you don't have to have lived it the first time round

Jonathan McAloon, FINANCIAL TIMES

The series has rightly been hailed a triumph . . . The point is in the detail. Often it tells us something other than the received wisdom of a later date. Kynaston's method insists on immersive reading, and it brings its rewards

Norma Clarke, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Remarkable . . . A sequence of colossally researched, witty, well-crafted, fun-loving and quietly impassioned social histories . . . Kynaston's books are little (or rather, large) miracles of research, oozing with primary sources

THE TIMES