Over in suburban Toledo, Ohio (though he never names it), O'Rourke was getting up to much the same sort of thing as Littlejohn, albeit a few years earlier. Children were expected to play outside and the war was also the chief inspiration of games. For other games, the grass seemed to be greener on the other side of the Atlantic. While English kids played cowboys and Indians and Davy Crockett, the young Ohians impersonated Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table. Curiously, the same applied in musical taste to Littlejohn and O'Rourke as teenagers: while Littlejohn fell in love with American soul and Motown, O'Rourke liked John Lennon and even skiffle, for heaven's sake. In one respect Littlejohn outdoes O'Rourke: he got to the Isle of Wight rock festival (as a precocious teenager), while O'Rourke failed to make Woodstock because his girlfriend had made a half-hearted suicide attempt (as he says, a very Sixties sort of event).

There is a deeper divide between the two writers. Littlejohn has written an engaging memoir describing a Britain that seems as distant from our country today as Camelot. He hates much of what Britain has become because it has jettisoned the beliefs which underpinned the society in which he grew up: family, independence, and adventurousness. O'Rourke, on the other hand, sets up similar scenarios to Littlejohn and then tries to knock them down. Are today's kids really any less daring than his generation? He looks outside and they seem to be much the same, scooting up and down the pavement. What about the boomers? He looks at his closest childhood buddies, and realises that far from being drop-outs and junkies, all have led deeply conventional lives.

You won't find the words "baby boomer" in Littlejohn's memoir but O'Rourke, like so many of his contemporaries, whether American or British, is obsessed with his generation. Whatever else we are, we're certainly the world's finest navel-gazers. O'Rourke was a standard-issue boomer: he went to college (unlike Littlejohn), worked for an "alternative" magazine, took industrial quantities of drugs and dodged the draft by persuading a gullible psychiatrist he was a hopeless addict (my guess is that he still feels guilty about this, understandably when 58,000 of his contemporaries died in Vietnam).

His endlessly jokey style can become wearisome: "We grew up. We got married. We found true love. This wrecked the marriage. But we're a caring generation. We sometimes take care of the kids on weekend." Ho, ho. But many will agree with his verdict on the boomers: "We're wilful, careless, rash, indulged and entitled." It could be David Willetts speaking. For all their faults, O'Rourke believes the boomers, both American and European, brought down the Berlin Wall by the sheer force of ridicule, have seen the world economy triple in size, and will never cause another world war because of their love of pleasure and self-indulgence. He might just be right there: the boomers were never good on self-sacrifice.