The current 1970s nostalgia — a gruesomely dishonest spectacle for those of us old enough to remember what we would rather forget — makes no mention of Chairman Mao presiding over the murders of millions of real and imagined enemies in the Cultural Revolution, with the assistance of his terrifying wife, Jiang Qing. Mao's doctor noticed paranoid symptoms as early as 1958, while Madame Mao would have alarmed the most tolerant psychologist with her insistence that all the rooms in her various homes had to be kept at a constant temperature of 21.5 degrees centigrade in winter and 26 degrees in summer. Even when the thermostat confirmed that her requirements were being met she would scream at her underlings, "You falsify the temperature! You conspire to harm me!" 

In the US, Richard Nixon, whose agencies were illegally bugging tens of thousands of Americans, was caught by his own White House bugging system telling Bob Haldeman, "Homosexuality, dope, immorality in general — these are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the communists and the left-wingers are pushing this stuff, they are trying to destroy us! You know it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalising marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?" In West Germany, the Baader-Meinhof gang and other left-wing terrorist groups took up arms because they claimed that the democratic Federal Republic was really a Nazi state. They then subscribed to the Nazis' paranoid conspiracy theory and used those arms to target Jews and firebomb synagogues.

Meanwhile, unemployment, inflation, strikes and a civil war in Northern Ireland pushed members of the British establishment into mental collapse. Sir William Armstrong, Edward Heath's chief civil servant, had a spectacular crack-up at a Ditchley Park conference. "Sir William sought out his namesake Robert Armstrong, the PM's principal private secretary, and said they must talk in a place that was ‘not bugged'," Wheen writes. "Robert Armstrong led him to a waiting room where Sir William stripped off his clothes and lay on the floor, chain-smoking and expostulating wildly about the collapse of democracy and the end of the world. In the middle of this chiliastic sermon, as the naked civil servant babbled about ‘moving the Red Army from here and the Blue Army from there', the Governor of the Bank of England happened to walk into the room. According to Robert Armstrong, he ‘took it all calmly'."