Novelist William Boyd Looks Back to the Past

During a phone call from his London home, Boyd says he was living in the U.K. in 1968 and then in 1969, he left for Paris. There, at 17, he met numerous people "who had been on the barricades" the previous May, and he soon realized that "the world was going to go to hell on a handcart." But this wasn't the feeling in the U.K.

"In Britain we were in a swinging '60s bubble," Boyd explains. The mood of fun and frivolity was expressed in a string of zany and largely subpar films like A Hard Day's Night and the lesser-known Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? The latter, he notes, was a flop, but it served as an inspiration for the novel. He wanted to "have a swinging '60s movie being made in Brighton, and around it the real world creeps in."