Category Archives: Baby Boomers

What we lose when Baby Boomers die

  • Posted by jennie
  • Posted on April 25, 2016
  • Baby Boomers
  • Comments Off on What we lose when Baby Boomers die

This has been a terrible year for celebrity Baby Boomers. David Bowie, Alan Rickman, then Victoria Wood and Prince in the space of two days… From Newsnight to Facebook, the media are awash with tears and tributes. As the BBC noted on 22 April, ‘It now seems rare for a week to pass without a significant celebrity […]

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After the election: beware the politics of generationalism

At the beginning of May, then Labour leader Ed ‘Moses’ Miliband unveiled six General Election pledges inscribed on a giant stone tablet. ‘These six pledges are now carved in stone, and they are carved in stone because they won’t be abandoned after the General Election’, Miliband intoned, six days before his party was swept away by […]

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‘Edge of Eternity’: before freedom was feared

  • Posted by jennie
  • Posted on October 10, 2014
  • Baby Boomers,Risk and fear
  • Comments Off on ‘Edge of Eternity’: before freedom was feared

For anyone who has devoured the first two novels in Ken Follett’s ‘Century Trilogy’, the publication of Edge of Eternity last month comes as an eagerly awaited treat. Follett’s journey through this tumultuous period took us through the First and Second World Wars (Fall of Giants, Winter of the World), and now brings us to the Sixties – […]

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The ‘generation war’ over abortion rights

A generation war seems to have erupted in the US pro-choice movement. A front-page feature article in Time magazine, published in the 14 January edition, began with the bold statement: ‘Abortion-rights activists won an epic victory in Roe v Wade. They’ve been losing ever since’. The author, Kate Pickert, sees the famous US Supreme Court ruling […]

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From the freewheelin’ Sixties to the fearmongerin’ Noughties

  • Posted by jennie
  • Posted on December 27, 2012
  • Baby Boomers,Risk and fear
  • Comments Off on From the freewheelin’ Sixties to the fearmongerin’ Noughties

Arthur Marwick’s history of the Sixties, first published in 1998, is one of those books that you just want to have on your shelf. Covering every cultural development from the rise of the mini-skirt to the birth of hippy culture, from sex and urban planning to art, film and literature, it’s a fascinating romp through […]

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A fresh-faced look at growing old

  • Posted by jennie
  • Posted on December 23, 2011
  • Baby Boomers
  • Comments Off on A fresh-faced look at growing old

‘But hoping for worse health and shorter lives hardly seems consistent with the American dream.’ With such pithy insights, Susan Jacoby – the fiercely rational intellectual whose previous books include The Age of American Unreason – exposes the banality of modern prejudices that have become attached to old age and the process of ageing. One such prejudice […]

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Post-radical depression

We all know about ‘Chick Lit’ – the phenomenon of young female writers getting big advances for novels based on the singleton lives of themselves and their friends. What’s next, it seems, is ‘Guilt-trip Lit’, where the menopausal mothers of the women’s fiction world turn their attention to the fucked-up lives of their grown-up children’s […]

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Wake up! The truth about youth apathy

‘It is known that young people have depressingly low levels of political interest and knowledge’, states the preface to the UK Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s report, ‘Young people’s politics: political interest and engagement amongst 14- to 24-year olds’, published in 2000 (1). Although there are no absolutely accurate statistics on how many young people vote, all […]

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Blair’s other babies

‘Buzzing…Best day I’ve had in ages.’ ‘I really enjoyed myself.’ ‘It was brilliant.’ Were these young people raving about a trip to Ibiza or Glastonbury? No – they were talking about a day spent at the Sound Republic nightclub in Leicester Square, London, consulting with home secretary Jack Straw, minister for women Tessa Jowell, and […]

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