Rod Liddle is what O'Rourke calls a freshman, i.e. last-generation baby boomer, who takes for granted the personal freedoms the older boomers fought (or sulked) for. Barack Obama is a freshman boomer too, which says it all. Liddle's take on modern Britain (subtitled "How we ended up greedy, narcissistic and unhappy") is not so different to Littlejohn's. He loathes lawyers, educators, the liberal elite (about whom he is extremely funny), the new generation of politicians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, consumerism, people who think they're ill when they aren't, David Starkey, the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School and the free-market economists of the Chicago School. I doubt, though, that Littlejohn shares his preferred solution: more state intervention, even nationalisation, which indicates that he, like Littlejohn, yearns for an idealised Britain that can never be re-created.

Reading Liddle is a bit like being stuck in the pub with a cantankerous stranger who has some interesting things to say but goes on rather too long. His book is laced with four-letter words which, like O'Rourke's jokes, start to grate after a few pages; perhaps foul-mouthed jokiness is a baby-boomer characteristic. (Interestingly, the best-written of these three books is Littlejohn's: he is the only one of the authors not to have gone to university.)

For what it's worth, like O'Rourke, I'm inclined to defend my generation while, like Littlejohn and Liddle, mourning the loss of the certainties that governed our parents' lives. I don't think we're so different to them except that we have a much closer relationship with our children. But the vast majority of us settled down after our youthful rebellions, worked hard and lived lives of blameless respectability. Even though many of us have reached retirement age some of us are still helping to look after our children and grandchildren (and sometimes even our parents). For all the local conflicts smouldering around the globe and the many dangers to our hard-won freedoms, mainly from Islamist fanatics, the world is much more prosperous and peaceful than the one we were born into. Perhaps we can take a little of the credit for that.