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When an epoch began: in a single year the frontier closed, a course toward the information society was set, and the first hints of a culture of irony appeared. Robert McHenry pinpoints the birth of the 20th century.

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If humans had six fingers on each hand, the likelihood is that we would have names for time spans of 12 and 144 years. As it is, by sheer evolutionary chance, we count in decades and centuries. This arbitrariness is then compounded by the fact that we number our years by an entirely accidental system of reckoning. Nonetheless, when the second digit from the right, and especially when the third one from the right, clicks over to the next increment, we tend to feel that some real milestone has been achieved, that somehow what follows will differ palpably from what came just before.

Later, looking back with some sort of organizing narrative in mind, we often find that we have to adjust the transition points a bit. So it is that, for example, "the Sixties," meaning in strict numerical terms the years 1960-1969 inclusive, now seems to refer to a period that for some began about 1963 or 1964--say, for convenience, with the "British invasion" of pop music, followed by the rest of the Swinging Britain business-but for others didn't really get underway until 1967 and the rise of psychedelia and all that. Or, since there can be no single authoritative narrative, maybe what happened is that the Fifties culminated in the British invasion, the truncated Sixties died abruptly in the recoil from Altamont, and then we gritted our teeth and got on with the Seventies.

However that may be,...

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