A thread of years
By: John Lukacs.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 481
Subjects: History, Modern -- 20th century.
Description: The distinguished historian John Lukacs here presents a series of fictionalized vignettes of daily life as experienced by ordinary individuals (most often in the United States, although Lukacs takes us to some European countries as well), each in a year from 1901 to 1969, and each followed by a short dialogue in which the author argues with an alter ego over why he has chosen to develop a given scenario in that particular year and what its significance might be.

The period represents the life of a single man, Kensington, which Lukacs weaves in and out of the text and through which can be traced the leitmotif of the book: the decline of Anglo-American civilization and of the ideal of the gentleman.

A history of manners and mores, a delightful - and poignantsuccession of sketches, the book brings the reader into the inner and often undeclared lives of individual men and women, at the same time placing them in the larger dramas of historical process in this century.