Big Babies | Granta

  • Published: 02/07/2007
  • ISBN: 9781862079526
  • 132x20mm
  • 256 pages

Big Babies

Michael Bywater

Have you ever had the feeling that, in some hard to define way, we are throwing away two and a half millennia of Western civilization, bit by bit, as our culture becomes more and more infantile? That day by day we grow more and more focused on the quick fix, the ticking-off, the expedient lie, the jingle, the spin, the catchy slogan, the obsession with safety, the horror of risk, the terror of complexity, the preoccupation with surface, the apportioning of blame, instant gratification? Have you ever wondered what happened to grown-ups? Michael Bywater turns his penetrating eye on the state of Western culture, from politics and the media to show business and science, from the White House to Buckingham Palace, from MTV to the BBC, from mission statements to Viagra spam, and concludes we are all Big Babies now. With enormous brio, he argues that the Baby-Boom generation is now running the show, and its own commitment to perpetual infantility is reflected in its unstoppable drive to infantilize the rest of us.

I suspect this book might change our world

Euan Ferguson, Observer

The funniest man in England

Literary Review

Bywater's hilarious social commentary highlights our loss of ability to manage our own lives

New Statesman

The Author

Michael Bywater is a writer and broadcaster and wrote for many years the ‘Lost Worlds’ column for the Independent on Sunday. He is the author of several books, including Lost Worlds and Big Babies, both published by Granta Books.

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From the Same Author

Lost Worlds

Michael Bywater

They go. They vanish. People. Civilizations. Languages. Philosophies. Works of art disappear, species are extinguished, books are lost. Dunwich is drowned, Pompeii buried, Athena’s statue gone from the Parthenon, Suetonius’s Lives of the Great Whores gone the way of the Roman Empire. Whole libraries of knowledge, galleries of secrets. Gone. Little things, too. Train compartments. Snuff, galoshes, smog. Your mother’s perfume. Our culture, our knowledge and all our lives are shadows cast by what went before. We are defined not by what we have but by what we have lost along the way. And so, Lost Worlds: a glossary of the missing, a cabinet of absent curiosities, weaving a web of everything we no longer have. Lost Worlds: the book the book that falls open at every page.