So Like Mike Then

Anita Roy September 03, 2007 00:00 IST So Like Mike Then -0001-11-30T00:00:00+05:53

1968. The May Student revolution in France; Prague spring and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviets; the massacre at Mai Lai; The Beatles singing ‘You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world’, and the Stones’ Street Fighting Man. Change was in the air.

Heady times for young men like Chris Carver, 19, and a "fairly typical" second-year student at LSE: "which is to say I’d spent the previous 18 months in an overheated coffee-bar argument about the best way to destroy the class system, combat state oppression and end the War". In March 1968, 80,000 protesters battled with mounted police outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square—Chris just one of the hundreds rounded up and imprisoned. His political idealism leads him from anti-Vietnam war protests to sit-ins and marches, experiments in communal living, squatters’ rights, clashes with the police over British imperialism in Ireland, the Anti-Nazi League, and finally to armed robbery, bombing, terrorism: any means necessary to...