Kicking off from the end of the second world war, each chapter in this surveys the bestselling books and characterises the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s in terms of what the bulk of the UK were buying and reading. The fashions changed over time and Sutherland makes some guesses at the reasons for the developments he charts.

He has been reading widely and attentively all his life to build up so wide a frame of reference, and although there are tin-eared sentences (usually when he is trying too hard, extending a metaphor or doing wordplay that doesn't come off) his opinions are interesting.

What I love about this is the fact that he focussses on massmarket reading patterns - a lot of books about hist of reading are about the first and revolutionary instances of an idea or trend, overlooking a tiny printrun which surely means the permeation of that idea/trend into society would not have happened in the year cited, but filtered through later..

JS however does not get SF&F. His comments on it seem obtuse. His knowledge of the development of childrens' books seems superficial and flippant, which leaves me less trusting of his judgements on the genres I am even more ignorant about.

Also, he generalises from his own life - english coffee was drinkable by the 60s (that is a fragment of autobiography not a pronouncement on UK culinary standards, Y/N?) Some of his subjective personal opinions (Terry Pratchett is not at all funny: Germaine Greer's take on feminism is representative of the whole movement: children's books can be summed up by Blyton and Dahl) are presented as hard FACT.

He has a theory about the readership of Pelzer's misery memoir (that it is read solely by males, what's more by bitter men smarting from the effects of modern life) which is not borne out by my experiences of bookselling - or by the sales patterns of that book as seen by any other bookseller I know. Again, Sutherland presents this as a statistical fact, not a guess. ( )