The 1960s is the gift that keeps giving. The Last Great Dream by Dennis McNally (Da Capo, £28) is an artful and engaging history of what used to be called the counterculture. In the US ground zero was San Francisco especially the Haight-Ashbury district. The City by the Bay had long been accepting of difference – from foreign sailors to communist agitators.

Bohemians begat beatniks begat hippies begat New Agers and the alternative lifestyle was born. Consciousness-raising, sexual liberation, environmentalism, living communally and expanding your mind soon spread across the world. Every young person had thoughts of going to San Francisco and wearing a flower in their hair. All, of course, a far cry from today’s young, whose credo is not ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ but rather ‘without my smart phone I am nothing!’

A host of things that we now take for granted – from organic food to complementary medicine – had their origins in the counterculture. Even the development of the personal computer can be laid at the feet of the alternative scene. Computers promised to open up the world and connect like-minded souls. It goes without saying that not all hippie dreams come true.

The 1960s produced hundreds of young heroes, artists, musicians, actors and people just famous for being famous. One such was Jane Birkin whose story is told in It Girl by Marisa Meltzer (Atria Books, £20). By the time she was in her early teens Birkin was model-girl pretty and fast becoming a fixture in Swinging London. In 1965 at the age of 18 she married the film music composer John Barry more than 10 years her senior. The marriage was brief and volatile.

Birkin famously made a fleeting and topless appearance in the pivotal 1966 movie Blow-Up. A move to Paris followed. Her fame was further secured by 1969’s controversial pop hit ‘Je t’aime’. 

Banned by the BBC and the Vatican, her duet with French singer Serge Gainsbourg featured her suggestive moaning and deep breathing. With further albums and a slew of movie roles Birkin became a French celebrity. In 1983 Hermes produced the Birkin, a roomy leather handbag which she helped design. And although Jane Birkin was the muse of many powerful men she once said with a touch of irony: “Men often saw me as their B-side.”

The 60s sexual liberation came late for gay men. Homosexuality was decriminalised in England in 1967 (in Scotland in 1981). The 1970s was the time for gay liberation. The cinema has long been a refuge for the LGBT community, a place to hide away from a hostile world. Film writer and critic Ryan Gilbey’s It Used to Be Witches (Faber, £20) is an expansive, idiosyncratic and very personal exploration of the changes in queer cinema and looks at how gay filmmakers found their voices. With criticism, reminiscence and interviews Gilbey explores historic gay films and more recent examples like Call Me By Your Name (2017).

Two gay Scotsmen are the subject of Damian Barr’s new novel The Two Roberts (Canongate, £18.99). It is based on the true story of Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde who studied together at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1930s before moving to London with huge hopes. Young and gifted, they were the toast of the town – at least for a time – featured in Picture Post and Vogue. In 1959 Ken Russell did a short film about them for the BBC arts show Monitor. The Roberts collaborated and lived together, drinking in grubby Soho pubs where they rubbed shoulders with the likes of Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and Dylan Thomas.

It was a louche lifestyle exemplified by Bacon’s famous barroom cry “champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!” Wedded to their art, the Roberts’ cubist/expressionist style, however, was eclipsed with the new abstract expressionism coming in from the US. Their output – McBryde’s still life’s and Colquhoun’s Picasso-inspired figurative work – began to look particularly fusty and old-fashioned. Their drinking did not stop.

The hard living particularly affected Colquhoun especially when in 1962 he had the chance of a solo show, intended to revive the couple’s fortunes, and worked through the night to produce new paintings. Exhausted he was to die in his studio in MacBryde’s arms. He was only 47. MacBryde never really recovered from the loss.

He gave up painting and moved to Dublin where he died tragically aged only 57.

Bluesky: @kenwilson84.bsky.social