To open any volume of David Kynaston’s history of postwar Britain is to experience the next best thing to time travel. In Mr Kynaston’s books the reader is drawn into a kaleidoscopic recreation, artfully weaving together diaries, letters, newspapers and increasingly, as the project reaches the 1960s, television programmes. These telling fragments form a richly textured whole. This week, the sixth volume appeared, covering events from the opening of the M1 in 1959 to the Beatles’ first recording session with George Martin in 1962. A unifying theme is the demolition of 19th-century urban landmarks – from the Gorbals to the Euston Arch – and their replacement by tower blocks and shopping centres. T Dan Smith, not yet disgraced, bestrides the end of this volume. Mr Kynaston’s sequence is a dazzling achievement. The good news is that, at this rate, he still has six more volumes in him before he arrives at journey’s end in 1979.