WE’RE a funny bunch when it comes to nostalgia. Last month I found my journey from the Dales back to York grinding to a crawl because of an event in a village en route, the way jammed with closed roads, tourists’ cars – and people driving US army-style jeeps.

Yes, they were celebrating the 1940s as though the bloodiest war in human history was the greatest fun imaginable, if you ignored food rationing and managed to dodge the doodlebugs. Of course, the vast majority of those enjoying dressing up as GIs and their gals were born long after VE Day.

But if there’s a decade to rival the war years for popularity it’s one with a very different reputation – the 1960s, with all that pop music extolling the joys of peace and love.

If the 1940s were full of dramatic events then two decades later we had a period of self-conscious change, full of new people and new ideas purporting to challenge the established order.

I think this has been exaggerated; there was a convincing study a few years ago which suggested that for most British people the social changes that were supposed to have happened in the 1960s actually took place in the unheralded 1970s.

However, people got the impression that all sorts of new and exciting things were happening in the 1960s, even if possibly only a relatively small number of much-publicised characters were getting up to the likes of free love and acid trips.

So that impression of radical change and emancipation from traditional values might explain why people who aren’t all that excited by war and austerity are fascinated by the 1960s – that and the explosion of British pop music, of course, a combination celebrated, rather ironically I’d suggest, by poet Philip Larkin’s lines suggesting sexual intercourse began in 1963 “Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles’ first LP”.

If anyone doubts the staying power of the pop revolution, they might consider what a success the Rolling Stones were at Glastonbury this summer, or that someone recently thought it worthwhile to release a “new” snapshot of pre-fame and pre-moptop Lennon and McCartney on the streets of Liverpool.

But there are other, darker sides to the decade which are also stuck fast in the national consciousness. Even now, half a century on, for many the most shocking British political scandal remains that involving John Profumo and Christine Keeler; the most audacious crime remains the Great Train Robbery; the most appalling crime remains the Moors Murders; and the most high-profile gangsters are still the Kray twins.

All have spawned countless books, newspaper articles and television programmes, plus a few movies and even a Monty Python sketch.

We’ve had plenty of crime and scandal since, but nothing has threatened to drive these dark events from the public consciousness. Anyone who doubts that should consider the public obsession down the years with Ian Brady and Ronnie Biggs. So why are we so fixated with this side of the 1960s as well as the lighter, fluffier phenomena more readily associated with the era? Maybe it’s precisely because people were hoping the decade would bring a break from gloom and suffering through the pursuit of individual happiness that the eruption of crime and scandal into this idyll made such an imprint on the national consciousness.

Or maybe it’s because the media of the time, principally television and newspapers, felt increasingly unfettered in the way they reported these events, so although many bad and shocking things happened in the “respectable” times before the 1960s they didn’t have the same impact – and the media kept feeding the public appetite for more of the same.

Of course, it could be that the 1960s were, as some think, a “hinge period” in our history and so events from that time actually are genuinely more significant than those before or since.

I don’t buy that. I think, fittingly for an era obsessed by image, it was the impression of change that gives events from that time a more vivid hue in our collective memory – even when they’re best viewed through a glass darkly.