ABSTRACT
All ages are ages of transition and only rarely and coincidentally does history see decisive breaks at century ends or, in modern times at least, at the change of a monarch. Indeed, it would be strange if such breaks were evident in social history. The ‘nineteenth century’ or the ‘twentieth century’ are meaningless concepts, though they have some mythic power: we expect change and so to some extent we create it. In this chapter I shall argue that, in several important respects, the decisive break with what we think of as the nineteenth century, or the late-Victorian world, does not come with the death of Victoria a few days into the twentieth century, nor even with the First World War, but in the period after 1945. The major trend in this latter age of transition, has been an accelerating discontinuity with the past.1
