From a cultural point of view, the 1960s was an exciting decade for British cinema. The sixties were characterised by a vibrant, popular film culture that was both more progressive and more diverse than the ‘doldrums era’ of the previous decade. Not for the first or the last time, a period of economic and structural instability created the conditions in which cultural creativity could flourish. It was in the early 1960s that the British new wave flowered with films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, A Kind of Loving, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Billy Liar and This Sporting Life, and that new British stars including Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Rita Tushingham and Julie Christie announced their arrival on the scene. It was in Britain that the exiled American director Joseph Losey and the voluntary émigré Stanley Kubrick made their most acclaimed films, while European auteur directors including Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut and Roman Polanski were also drawn by the culture of ‘Swinging London’. British cinema experienced a hitherto unprecedented degree of critical and commercial success: no fewer than four British films – Lawrence of Arabia, Tom Jones, A Man for All Seasons and Oliver! – won the Academy Award for Best Picture, while another three – The Knack, Blow-Up and if … – all won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. And in 1962 a fantastical secret agent thriller called Dr No marked the beginning of what would become the most commercially successful film series in the history of British cinema. Even with the caveat that, as ever, there was a hinterland of lesser films beneath the classics – the sixties were also the decade of such turkeys as Gonks Go Beat and The Bobo – there is nevertheless much substance to Robert Murphy's claim that ‘the 1960s saw a greater number of significant and exciting films made in Britain than at any time before or since’.