Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990). 470 pp., L20.
Arthur Balfour is quoted as saying of Winston Churchill's World Crisis that Winston had written an autobiography and called it a history of the world. In Our Age: Portrait of a Generation, Lord Annan has written an autobiography and called it a history of his age. His subject concerns the most influential British thinkers, writers, dons, and civil servants, born around the same time as himself (1916). That is, those who, between 1945 and Mrs. Thatcher's election in 1979, secured positions from which they could run the country. Either that, or they influenced and cowed the politicians who were supposed to be running it.
Until Annan began to see some good in Mrs. Thatcher, their beliefs, tastes, and prejudices were his. This is because he was one of them. He uses the term "Our Age" throughout. Our Age did this, Our Age thought that. He means the few hundred people like himself, at the summit, and the few hundred thousand lower down, perhaps solely consisting of the readers of what John Osborne's Jimmy Porter called the "posh" Sunday newspapers, who approved of what the summiteers were doing. Lord Annan is too modest to say it, but his autobiography really is a history of his age--or rather, of the people who ended up in charge of his age. It is like a history of postwar America consisting only of the thoughts and actions of the most vocal people living inside the Beltway and on the island of Manhattan.
