The Sixties, by Jenny Diski, Profilebooks; £10.99

SOMETIMES I wonder about the girl in the next ‘phone booth on that bright summer morning in the mid-60s at London’s Nottinghill tube station.

She was shaking visibly as she slapped a vein, tightened the strap around her arm, then relaxed, her eyes closing, as the needle sank home and the drug began to work.

It was hardly Jenny Diski, but her latest book, The Sixties, is darkly redolent of the drug culture of that much-hyped era. It was around the time I first heard Bert Jansch sing the Needle of Death in a Soho folk club, a ballad that influenced a generation of young drug takers. The Sixties is largely a personal memoir of what Jenny Diski did in those heady days of mind-altering LSD, methedrine, ether, dope, hippies, Bob Dylan, the mini skirt, casual sex, The Rolling Stones, the Pill and The Beatles.