From literary classics to cookery books, blockbuster airport novels to self-help manuals, John Sutherland offers a portrait of Britain through the books that have inspired, excited and encouraged us to part with our cash. By exploring popular reading since 1945 Sutherland reveals a rich and compelling picture of the books themselves, the tremendous social changes and our responses to them. After the upheaval of World War II, Dr Eustace Chesser's ground-breaking sex manual Love without Fear reminded us how to make love not war; amid the austerity of food rationing, Elizabeth David wrote the first of her bestselling cookery books when most people could only dream of new foods and flavours. However, optimism soon turned to Cold War paranoia, which inspired John Wyndham to create his apocalyptic science fiction of the 1950s. Ian Fleming and John le Carr responded with their espionage thrillers of the 1960s and, in the 1980s, Peter Wright achieved notoriety with his all-too-factual Spycatcher. Occasionally, developments in publishing have themselves prompted social change. The acquittal of Lady Chatterley's Lover for obscenity in 1960 emancipated fiction in Britain, opening the way both for the 'bonkbuster'a novelists of the 1970s and 1980s and, in the 1990s, for the shocking realism of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. With media globalization, Stephen King's Carrie and Bronowski's The Ascent of Man became forerunners in a franchise industry embracing print, film and merchandise, continuing today with the enormous success of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Lively, entertaining, and often humorous, Reading the Decades provides a unique view of the cultural and social history of the later twentieth century.