The men returning to Oxford University after the two world wars

I'm reading A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-60 by Nihil Krishnan.

This volume is part of a sudden glut on the thought and personalities of 20th-century British philosophers. There are two books on the group of women philosophers who studied at Oxford during the second world war - Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgeley - as well as a biography of J.L. Austin.

I think this passage from Krishnan on the difference between the men who returned to Oxford from the two world wars is an interesting snippet of social history:

In 1919, one observer remembered, the returning men "jumped when a door banged; they could not sleep without a night cap of whisky; they awoke shouting in nightmares'. Desperate "to recover the douceur de vivre of the Edwardian years", the tone they had set was one of "febrile gaiety".

The generation returning in 1945 was less jumpy. Their memory of the time before the war was not of an Edwardian summer but one long winter of discontent and menace. Their wars had not been spent in trenches waiting for orders or a fatal bomb. They had been busy, and when not busy, mostly safe. Their tutors found them "forward-looking and entirely serious there was no line between workers and playboys".