When a few years later I wrote a book called The Neophiliacs, analysing the revolution that had so transformed English life in the Fifties and Sixties, I described how we watched the grainy black-and-white television images of that funeral with a strange sense of unease. “It was as if a nation which for years had been subjecting itself to faked emotion, turning its back on the past to lose itself in the unnatural glare of the present, was now desperately trying to conjure up the real emotion which it knew to be appropriate and finding that it no longer quite knew how.”