Regardless of whether the Chinese Curse (May you live in interesting times) originated in oriental philosophy or was merely the fictional product of some Westerner’s fevered imagination, there's no doubt that the latter part of the twentieth century was one of the more turbulent periods in the history of the world.
When the phrase came into use in the thirties and forties, you could have forgiven those who used it for wishing that things would quieten down in the future. Interesting times would be an understated description of the years that followed World War One, encompassing, as they did, the rise of the Soviet Union, the emergence of fascism in Italy and Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the circumstances leading up to and following in the wake of the Great Depression and the first part of the titanic struggle between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chaing Kai Shek’s Kuomintang.
If those who lived through those years were hoping for tranquility once current difficulties were resolved, their hopes were never going to be fulfilled. Indeed, when one looks back to the years that followed the Second World War the participants had hardly enough time to gather their breath before the times became very interesting indeed.
There were a number of historical strands, some going back well before the start of the twentieth century, that came to fruition or a significant turning point between 1950 and the start of the twenty-first century.
That era also encompasses the early part of my own life, and from the vantage point of retirement as I look back over my life and times I find myself musing over the significance of events that I may have been too preoccupied to pay attention to as they were going on. The results of those musings can be found in this particular project.
As an avid reader, and a historian by academic training and inclination I have a deal of material on my bookshelves that relates to the period, and this project will, I hope, provide a degree of focus for a considerable chunk of my reading over the next few years.
Looking back, I recall a childhood that seemed comfortably isolated from the outside world, at least until the sixties, when things became very scary at an alarming rate. After an examination of the way things were through my childhood, or rather the way it seemed things were, I propose to examine a number of themes and events and the way they changed the social, political and cultural environments we live in.
That shouldn't be seen as hearkening back to some dimly remembered golden age when things were so much better. You can't as the saying goes, go home again, and looking back on my memories of the fifties there's no real reason why I'd be inclined to.
Neither should what follows be seen as a nostalgic look back to a golden era in the decade that followed the fifties. Sure, it was an exciting time to be young, but there were, at the same time, any number of things that would, with the benefit of hindsight, have been better avoided.
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