David Morant recalls the fate of a generation that cleaved to a preposterous idea - the notion that society could be ordered justly and that lives might be lived more freely and passionately. His generation experienced a moment, a sense of an opening into difference. But as the decades wear on, Morant has come to face the failure of that possibility, witnessing the rise of an obliteratingly monolithic, glitteringly violent and sterile order that permits no alternative way of being. Teacher, moralist, slightly embarrassed sports jock and unintentional libertine, worried always about violence, not least his own, David Morant picks through the wreckage of his times to understand what happened and whether the old commandment to enjoy this life and to change the world still has meaning. Morant is the disjointed, impure text that results from that effort.