Not Fade Away: The Children of the 1930s

Abstract

A generation of scholars, writers and diplomats, mostly born in the 1930s, who grew up in depression and war but became young adults at the advent of a new era of security and comfort, is fading away. John le Carré, one of the great post-war writers of any genre, rendered in his spy fiction Britain’s post-imperial reckoning, and brought back in 2017 George Smiley, his most acutely realised spy, to lament the folly of Brexit. Five more children of the 1920s, 30s and 40s who were important contributors this journal have died in recent years. Michael Howard (1922–2019), Ronald Steel (1931–2023), Pierre Hassner (1933–2018), David Calleo (1934–2023) and James Dobbins (1942–2023) each reflected shrewdly and profoundly on war and peace, global politics, and the US and Europe. At a time when the world appears to be regressing, we might best honour this generation by holding to the fictional Smiley’s vision ‘of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason’.