More on 'Saturday'

Nick Cohen, in the essay mentioned, goes on to remark:

I need to be careful before theorising, because television editors tell me that every vaguely political script they are offered these days presents new Labour as a bunch of lying mass murderers. But when it comes to the novel, my guess is that the true hatred will come from the young, and that writers over 40 will go on pulling their punches...

There is an echo of this in the novel itself. Henry Perowne in about 5 pages of argument about Iraq with his daughter Daisy .
She says: 'Why is it that the few people I've met who aren't against this crappy war are all over forty?'
He says: 'What do you think the Bali bombing was about? The clubbers clubbed.'

Towards the end, Henry imagines a middle-aged doctor like himself, in February 1903, a product of prosperity and decades of peace, unable to envisage the horrors ahead. And now, 'totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing, and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing.'