MIRANDA SAWYER: You’re not that special, you are part of your generation, that affects your taste, it affects how you approach things.
HZ: So there’s a certain amount of identity forged by the time in which you are.
MS: Absolutely. And it’s to do with television shows, fashion, what happened to you when you’re a teenager, the general atmosphere around you - when you see programmes about the history of punk, they’re always talking about the three-day week and rubbish in the streets, and it was quite awful. You can’t help things like that shaping you. They just do.

HZ: So if, say, you were born between 1925 and 1942, you’d be part of the Silent Generation, as the McCarthy era taught you to lie low. Landed on this earth between 1843 and 1859? Progressive Generation - growing up during the American Civil War, you’d react against that when you came of age and prioritise progress and reform over the pursuit of power. According to the circumstances surrounding them, generations have been profiled all the way back to 1433, the Arthurian Generation.

Much of the identification of the generational cycles has been spearheaded over the past three decades by Neil Howe and his late collaborator William Strauss. They even have their names on a theory, Strauss-Howe generational theory. But generational theory itself goes back farther. Thomas Jefferson effectively espoused it in a letter to James Madison in 1789, contemplating how the United States could reboot its constitution every 19 years to allow for the changing requirements of each new generation. And then, in the nineteenth century, generational theory really took off amongst philosophers and sociologists.

HZ: The idea of the generations solidifies when they have labels. But those labels are an odd collection. There’s no aesthetic or thematic connection between, say, 'Silent Generation' and 'Baby Boomer' and 'Generation X' and 'Millennials' - and the attempt to follow Generation X with Generation Y didn't really take off, instead 'Millennial' was the name that stuck.