Between the years 1965 and 1971 something happened to make the world on one side of that divide all but unrecognisable to the world on the other side. For better or for worse (it very much depends on whom you ask), those seven years revolutionised western-and eventually global-culture as utterly as any of the great turning points in our history. What happened were the hippies.

Long hair, grass and LSD, free love, rock music and the other great festivals from Monterey to Woodstock, antiwar protests and political activism, communes and macrobiotics, spiritual seeking in Eastern religions and personal transformation in therapies and practices from est to gestalt, the first stirrings of the modern environmental and feminist movements: the hippies were defined by virtually everything so-called straight society was not.

Hippie is a sensory delight and a mind-expanding trip for those who came of age before and after the hippie years and wonder what that time was really like, and especially for those who were part of the scene themselves and would like to know how their particular experience fits in with everything that the hippies meant and presaged.