Loving Peter, by Judy Cook with Angela Levin / My life as a wife, by Elisabeth Luard

To read even a few pages of the opening tranches of Loving Peter and My Life as a Wife is to be plunged headfirst into a lost world, a landscape so antediliuvian that it wouldn't be wonderful to glimpse a pterodactyl suddenly taking wing above the sleek South Kensington surround. Soft-top E-type Jaguars slide noiselessly through King's Road side-streets; Oxford graduates in dinner jackets crack jokes in Soho basements; Mick and Marianne are living just around the corner. Soundtrack is by the Beatles, couture comes courtesy of Biba; and no ornament of that far-off Sixties rumpus-room, from David Frost to Princess Margaret, or Stephen Ward to Eleanor Bron, is denied their luminous walk-on part.

The parallel careers enjoyed by Judy Huxtable, the second Mrs Peter Cook, and Elisabeth Luard, the only Mrs Nicholas Luard, are so uncannily close in scope and denouement that their joint presence in this autumn's publishing schedules almost suggests collusion.

Each was launched by her affluent mother, in a state of virginal bewilderment, on to the London deb scene of the late 1950s. Each married a mercurial young man who operated at the heart of the burgeoning Sixties "Satire" boom (Cook as performer, Luard as impresario).

Each then sat unhappily by as Mr Right went out and spent the rest of the decade lavishly amusing himself. Each (in Cook's case indirectly, as the divorce had come through) spent a terrible twilight period watching the love of their life drink himself to death.

The Luard/Cook business association was short-lived: they were co-owners of the Establishment Club until the bailiffs began to circle at the end of 1963, at which point Luard's Private Eye shares were sold to Cook to balance the magazine's books.

The pathology, on the other hand, is much less tangential. The subtext of each of these bruised and sorrowful memoirs can be reduced to a single question: what caused their talented and personable male leads to behave in the way they did? In each case, ominously enough, the answer seems to have something to do with the decade in which the seeds of all this future misery were sown.

The Sixties – freewheeling, optimistic, a free-lunch counter for young men on the make – offered an environment in which the likes of Cook and Luard found it easy to flourish.

Once they were over, so, effectively, were Cook and Luard: the one because his talent dried up and his more versatile partner went off to Hollywood (Dudley Moore's defection is represented as a trauma from which Cook never really recovered); the other because he had no way of subduing his personal myth – that of the rakish lady-killing entrepreneur – to ordinary life.

Throughout both books, as Cook's career settles down into 20 years of faded glory (he died in 1995) and Luard's into madcap scheming (including, it should be said, the London Marathon and the establishment of a trust to preserve the Scottish highlands), the atmosphere is, approximately, that of a Simon Raven novel: louche, gamey and affairé by turns.

High politics is never forgotten (the Profumo scandal, Luard commissioning the famous photo of Christine Keeler astride a chair); royalty comes and goes; connection, in this tight little oligarchical world, is all. The Luards' lifestyle is one of well-nigh Thackerayan gilt-by-association, where there is never any money but one's brother-in-law is the Lord Chancellor and the man next to one at dinner turns out to be Michael Heseltine.

Procedurally, on the other hand, nothing could be further apart than the manner in which the widows of these two Sixties titans have chosen to tell their tale. Judging by the blizzard of status-defining adjectives that descends on each newcomer to the text ("playwright Harold Pinter", "mercurial black trumpeter Miles Davis"), the potential audience for Loving Peter would seem to consist of people who haven't read a newspaper for 40 years.

Were the Almighty suddenly to drop from the clouds on to the stage of the Establishment, he would be introduced as "bearded, white-robed, patriarchal divinity God".

Luard, mercifully, not only assumes that people who buy her book will have heard of most people she writes about, but has produced something genuinely poignant. Anger and gnawing dissatisfaction do battle with an enduring sense of loss, and only the catchpenny sub-title, "Love, Liquor and What to Do About the Other Women", grates.

In their separate ways both authors offer a united front on the significance of the 1960s, or at any rate its sexual legacy. It was, they agree, a men's decade, in which – unless you happened to be Germaine Greer – the new freedom on offer to women was really only the freedom to be exploited by men.

As for Peter and Nicholas (who died in 2004) and other satirical talents on display here, it is good once again to be reminded of what brilliant, witty and age-defining behemoths they were, and also of the harm they did both to themselves and the people around them.

DJ Taylor's 'Bright Young People' is published in paperback by Vintage