There is Britain before 1965 and Britain after 1965 - and they are not the same thing. 1965 was the year Britain democratised education, it was the year pop culture began to be taken as seriously as high art, the time when comedians and television shows imported the methods of modernism into their work. It was when communications across the Atlantic became instantaneous, the year when, for the first time in a century, British artists took American gallery-goers by storm. Here, Christopher Bray shows how 1965 is the hinge year in a decade of change - the year on which everything in our subsequent history swings, the year when everything changed - and when everyone knew it.