I used to be fairly confident in my opinion that I would not have enjoyed the 1950s very much. Apart from disasters such as Suez or the invasion of Hungary, it seems as if it would have been a decade of watching paint dry: bungling and bellicose Tory administrations, national service, anti-immigrant fervour, dismal pop music, food rationing until 1954, numbing social conformity, and the rise of the poisonous Daily Sketch, a newspaper of which Raymond Chandler wrote: "I wouldn't use their rotten rag even to stuff up a rat hole." On the other hand, there was also the mindlessly pro-Soviet Daily Worker ("Soviet troops called in to stop White Terror"). As Hannah Arendt wrote to her husband in 1952: "the most civilised country on earth, but also the most boring! . . . A dull blanket of fear lies over the country." What this is a fear of we do not discover, which somehow makes it all the more disturbing.

After reading 700 pages about the years 1951-57, it would appear I was right. The extraordinary thing is that David Kynaston has managed to give us the full flavour of the times without producing something soporific. This is even more surprising considering how much he quotes from ordinary people's diaries, such as the Pooterish Anthony Heap  among the more telling of whose index entries is the splendid "ignores Suez crisis, 628". Then again, it is the Heaps of this world, rather than snooty critics, who can confidently predict a long run for such plays as The Mousetrap, which he suspected would run "until well after the coronation".

Mass Observation was still going, so there is an exhaustive wealth of material for Kynaston to quote from. Yet somehow, even banal opinions achieve a certain poignancy, coming, as they do, from another country (by which I mean the past, as in LP Hartley's The Go-Between, which appeared in 1953). There is something about the quotations from MO which seems to sum up exactly what was so awful about the times, about the fears and dislikes of ordinary people: when asked to offer their ideas of what the ideal afterlife is like, one woman, a 41-year-old working-class divorcee from Oldham, says simply: "similar to life here but no sex life".

Against these are set quotations from the more disaffected intelligentsia. It is mischievous of Kynaston to choose those diary entries of John Fowles's that make him sound like a rather tiresome and snobbish young man, reacting to commercial television with furious disdain: "And such rubbish . . . Desecration of most sacred themes  death, birth. Americanised voices and manners . . ."

Out of dull material, then, Kynaston has produced something fascinating, which is probably the supreme achievement for the popular historian. Sometimes there are weird juxtapositions  the Queen meets Marilyn Monroe in the same paragraph as Eden announces the Anglo-French ultimatum to Nasser; we are told that "the battle of Frith Street", between Jack Spot and a sidekick of his rival Billy Hill, takes place "eight days after Godot"; but then it is out of such chaotic impressions that a sense of history is made.

The 1950s weren't all boring, though. There are bright moments, and intimations of new beginnings: the Goons make their debut; Kenneth Tynan takes on Loamshire; John Lennon forms a skiffle group; John Ravenscroft, later Peel, has his mind blown by Elvis Presley (whose own career survives the scathing verdict of Eric Hobsbawm, in his role as the New Statesman's jazz critic: "a peculiarly unappealing Texan lad . . . with a line in suggestive belly-dancing"); and Waiting for Godot comes to London ("as pretentious and preposterous a piece of highbrow poppycock as ever I've had the misfortune to see"  Anthony Heap). The only significant omission that I can see is that there is no mention of one of the age's finest cultural commentators and philosophers, Nigel Molesworth, created by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. Maybe he can squeak into the next book in the series.

David Kynaston is at the Guardian Hay festival on Wednesday 2 June.