A year or two ago Germaine Greer, discussing the shortlisted artists for the Turner Prize, ended huffily by saying that if this is the way the world is now, she was delighted that she wouldn't have to be part of it for very much longer. Time was she would have leapt on the barricades and given the world a piece of her mind, explaining exactly what it had to do to shape up. Of course, the fact that she has to complain now about the world gone to wrack and ruin means that back then, at her most gladiatorial, the world took not a blind bit of notice and went on its way, impervious. It's a generational thing, disappointment; part of a cycle of anger, action and failure that is as inevitable as hormone fluctuation, but which seems to have taken the postwar baby boomers quite by surprise. It was there to be read about in classical and modern literature, in histories, in drama, poetry and the defeated mutterings of our own grandparents and parents. But our time was different, we thought, and we seem still to think, because even now we can't work out what happened.

LRB 6 July 2000 | PDF Download