The book was prompted by the Time magazine cover of April 1966 on which, across a collage of famous British faces, ran the bold headline LONDON: THE SWINGING CITY. Don McCullin, described by Aitken as a ‘top young photojournalist’, was world-famous within what seemed like minutes. It came a little too early for some important figures: Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch three years later and Carmen Khalil founded Virago, in 1973.

It was the dawn of a new kind of satirical humour (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, David Frost, On the Fringe and That Was the Week That Was) a new elite (with the marriage of Anthony Snowden and Princess Margaret, for instance) a fashion revolution the birth of the boutique The Beatles, The Rolling Stones…įor anyone doing research on the Sixties, the book is the Bible. This was the decade that saw the arrival of the Pill the legitimisation of homosexuality the abolition of hanging the Oz and Lady Chatterley’s Lover trials. The Young Meteors was really just a glorified list of successful men and women who shaped the Sixties – that extraordinary era that changed everything. (The others were Marit Allen of Vogue and Georgina Howell of the Observer – both dead now, sadly.)Īitken lauds the women journalists of the Sixties but is puzzled by the lack of female editor The Young Meteors it was called, and I was one of them.Īt that time, I was 27 years old and the fashion editor of the Sunday Times and Aitken put me in as one of the three powerful influencers in that world. In 1967, Jonathan Aitken, then a young journalist on the Evening Standard (his uncle, Lord Beaverbrook, owned it at the time) wrote a book about the upcoming young movers and shakers in London – the stars of the Sixties (to mix celestial bodies). I am not bragging when I say that 56 years ago I was a young meteor.

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