I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.
Here we were supposedly changing the world for the better in the Sixties, but as we get 40 years further down the line, we realise that some of those changes such as the drugs probably weren't all that great or sensible. It was all about social experiments.
No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.
In the early sixties, we were strong, we were virulent.
That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available.
The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.
We made them drink poison last night and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave the Americans a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly.
I don't worry whether the period is contemporary or three hundred years ago. Human beings are all alike.
From the first I became convinced that what I must look for was lead dust and lead fumes, that men were poisoned by breathing poisoned air, not by handling their food with unwashed hands.