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Free radicalsThe ideas from the generation born after WW2 were so powerful that they altered our ways of thinking, as a new exhibition at the V&A Museum explores. Co-curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh comment on fi ve years that shook the worldThe years from 1966 to 1970, just 1,826 days, shook the foundations of post-WW2 society and undeniably shaped the way we live today. They set the agenda that is at the heart of the current fi erce struggle between Western liberal values and fundamentalism of all sorts: the rights of the individual and their relationship to the ‘State’. In the UK in 1965 society was in many ways unrecognisable. Homosexuality was illegal; police entrapment was common; abortion was illegal; you could be hanged for murder; a woman had to be married to get the pill; divorce was uncommon and rarely granted; racial discrimination was commonplace; women could be paid less than men for the same work; theatre performances were subject to offi cial censorship. In sharp contrast, LSD was still legal. Similar value systems existed across most of the West, yet by 1970 much of this had changed in most Western countries. Revolutions of different kinds had taken place – in look, lifestyle, politics and beliefs – but which achieved real, permanent change, and which faded in subsequent decades? In the current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966–1970 and its accompanying book, we explore key subject areas and locations where these revolutions took place: fashion; drugs, clubs and counter-culture; human rights and street protests; consumerism; festivals; and alternative communities. From London’s Carnaby Street to the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, tech innovators in the Bay Area Labs to protesters on the streets of Paris, and alternative communities across America to festival-goers at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, these years saw an optimistic idealism that motivated people to come together and question established power 40 NADFAS REVIEW / WINTER 2016 www.nadfas.org.uk