Volume 38, Number 10 · May 30, 1991
The 'We' Generation
By Ian Buruma
Our Age: Portrait of a Generation
by Noel Annan
Random House, 479 pp., $30.00
When Maurice Bowra, don and master of the Oxford Wits, was asked about the age of some clever, young boy, he would often answer 'our age,' thus inspiring, without knowing it the title of the book at hand. By our age, so Noel Annan explains, the witty don meant 'anyone who came of age and went to the university in the thirty years between 1919, the end of the Great War, and 1949—or, say, 1951….' But not just anyone, of course: 'Bowra meant those who make their times significant and form opinion.'
Review, 4250 words
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