Francis Wheen - Strange Days Indeed - The Golden Age of Paranoia

*Whitlam’s premiership was itself snuffed out by Her Majesty the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General Sir John Kerr, who sacked him in November 1975. In true Seventies fashion, some furious Whitlam supporters claimed that Kerr had acted on orders from the CIA.

*‘This particular house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history – a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf – but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind we got the place exorcised.’

*Baader-Meinhof members waged war against West Germany’s ‘performance society’, claiming that it induced mental illness in its citizens. Perversely, they seemed to think that the remedy was to terrorise the nation into a state of paranoia instead, through a campaign of bombings and assassinations that revived memories of Nazi methods in the 1930s. Jillian Becker’s study of the group, published in 1977, was titled Hitler’s Children.

*In 1946 Hunt was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to finance the writing of his novel Stranger in Town , beating two other up-and-coming authors who applied for the same fellowship. ‘The only thing Truman Capote and I have in common,’ Gore Vidal said, ‘was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim.’

*See, for example, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club , Sebastian Faulks’s Engleby , Hanif Kureishi’s Something to Tell You , Helen Walsh’s Once Upon a Time in England , Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions , Louis de Bernières’s A Partisan’s Daughter , Richard T. Kelly’s Crusaders , Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency. Hensher discusses these novels in ‘Writing the Nation’, Prospect magazine, April 2008, pp.32–6.

*A diary entry by James Lees-Milne, English aesthete and castle-creeper, for Friday, 21 June 1974: ‘This morning I endeavoured to get a Bath number for three-quarters of an hour. Three times I rang the exchange, three times the supervisor. Finally, I was driven so mad with rage that I shouted abuse down the mouthpiece and smashed the telephone to smithereens on the hearthstone. Pieces of it flew across the room to the windows. Instead of feeling ashamed I felt greatly relieved. And if it costs me £50 to repair it was worth it. I only wish the telephonist who was so obstructive and impertinent to me had been the hearthstone.’

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