RESOURCES: Classic text revisited ... Absolute Beginners ColinMacInnes, 1959

The novel is set in North Kensington in the long hot summer of 1958.

The unnamed narrator-hero, a hip photographer, is in his last year as a teenager. Through him, we see a London milieu of mixed races, classes, drug preferences and sexual orientations. He is adrift in a world of scooters and coffee bars accompanied by some colourful friends: Wizard, a pickpocket and entrepreneur; Big Jill, a lesbian; Cool, an African trumpet player; and Crepe Suzette, his materialistic girlfriend.

When Cool speaks of growing tensions between whites and blacks, the narrator responds with disbelief: "I cried out, 'Cool, this is London, not some hick city in the provinces! This is London, man, a capital, a great big city where every kind of race has lived ever since the Romans'." But things get worse, and the book vividly depicts the simmering eruption of racial violence, dramatising the 1958 Notting Hill riots.