So where were you, exactly, when the Eighties ended? Try asking me and I can tell you quite precisely, the way some of the oldies can remember just what they were doing at the moment President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was on board that great trans-European train the Salieri Express, riding i east from Vienna to Budapest, Hungary, for what I thought was a very brief visit. I sat alone in the grey-upholstered com­partment; my lightweight bag lay on the rack, my lightweight anorak hung on the hook beside me. Near me on the seat lay a paperback copy of The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s fine I novel about disordered Europe just before the First World War. I had begun to read it; now for some reason I had set it aside and it lay neglected. I’d quickly bought it in the excellent British Bookshop, near the Stephansdom in Vienna, partly because it dealt with another part of turn-of-the-century forest kindly young Gerstenbacker had taken me through the previous day, but also for another reason. For the novel contains a famous portrait of a modern thinker, called Naphta in the book, and based on the Marxist Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs. And Lukacs (Budapest 1885 geboren, author of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism and Theory of the Novel) – a man of whom Mann said, ‘As long as he was talking, he was always right’ – was supposed to have had great influence over and significance for the man I was now hunting, Bazlo Criminale.

As soon as I started the book, I began having strange feelings of discomfort. For Mann’s book opens with a nice young man, Hans Castorp, well-meaning, naive, unassuming (in other words, just like myself), sitting alone with a book in the grey-upholstered compartment of a trans-European train, bag on the rack, coat on the hook, a book on the seat. Eighty years ahead of me, he’s beginning his quest for life in a disordered world, leaving the flatlands and off to the uplands on a very short visit that will last a long time. His view of the world is about to change completely; the world itself is about to change too. After a few minutes I put down the book and stared through the window. The train was crossing the Burgenland, once Austria’s Russian zone. To my left were the lowlands of the Danube plain – marshes, long fields, small tractors, little villages with onion-domed churches (perhaps a building with a cabbage on the top wasn’t so odd after all). To my right high hills sloped up to the great grey crags and whitened tops of the Eastern Alps. Grey mist blew across the plain to my left; the mountains on the right were dark with storm and wintry cloud. Behind me lay Vienna, baroque and deceptive; not far ahead lay the Hungarian frontier, at Hegyeshalom, recently a grim border through which the refugees of 1956 and 1989 had poured, bur now, they told me, no problem, no problem at all.

Feeling slightly uneasy, I pushed Mann’s book away and looked round the neat compartment. In front of me was a small table, rubbish bin underneath, on which lay a couple of papers left by the kind management for sophisticated international travellers like myself. One was a small blue rail timetable, which stated with precision and conviction the various arrival and departure times of the Salieri Express. The other was a small Austrian tabloid newspaper of no distinction, the Kurier, dated Freitag, 23 November, 1990 (the day, of course, on which I was travelling). I picked it up and began to read. Now, as I told you earlier, I don’t exactly read German, but there are times – late at night, after a drink or two, and especially when I’ve spent a couple of days in a German-speaking country – when it seems very nearly comprehensible. The headline for the day was a long one, and it read: ‘Die Eiserne Lady gibt auf: Rücktritt nach 11 Jahren. Eine Ära ist zu Ende.’

I was sharp enough to realize that, unless the world contained some more Iron Ladies that I didn’t know about, this almost certainly referred to Britain’s then Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, under whose regime I had grown accustomed to live. So I tuned my intelligence and set to work on the sentence. It seemed to say: The Iron Lady Takes Off, Fed Up After Eleven Years. An Era Is at an End.’ Was this true, I asked myself, amazed; could I be interpreting the words correctly? Now what you must understand is that I myself was one of the great brood of Thatcher’s Children. I was hardly past the hard acned days of puberty when she marched into 10 Downing Street in 1979, pronouncing in her loud clear voice ‘Now there is work to be done.’ Her life and work shaped mine. The ups and downs, the highs and lows, the booms and recessions, the Big Bangs and Small Crashes of her three terms of office were nothing less than the swings and cycles of what I liked to call my adult life. With my soul and my overdraft, my professional ambitions and my mountain bike, I was spawned from the era of what the Austrian newspaper in front of me described as ‘Der Thatcherismus’ – a term that, incidentally, sounded far more impressive in German than it ever possibly could in English.

So she’d gone, stepped down, gabbed off? How could she? Was it possible, how had it happened? I turned over the pages of the tabloid; and there inside, right across a double-page spread, was the fuller story, headed ‘Des Ringen um die Nachfolge.’ This sounded just like one of the Wagner operas Lavinia had been threatening me with in Vienna; but what did it mean? The Battle of the Night Birds? And if there had been a great drama, where was the cast? I looked down the page, and there they all were, set out as if in some opera programme, with photographs and brief descriptions. There was, I saw, Michael Heseltine, der Opportunist;well, I understood that. Then there was Douglas Hurd, der alte Routinier (the old what? Truckdriver?), Sir Geoffrey Howe, der Totengraber (the Grave-snatcher?), and John Major, der Senkrechtstarter (what could that be? Kickstart?). Not quite, I found, scuffling hastily through my dictionary. The opera was The Struggle for the Succession, and the principal characters were the Opportunist, the Wise Old Hand, the Gravedigger, and the Vertical Take-Off Aircraft, who, I gathered, triumphed in the end. Add book by Martin Amis, celestial-sounding music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, oedipal dreams by Freud, a chorus or two of ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’, and Vienna’s newest musical extravaganza was plainly all ready to play.

Well, fine for them; but where, I thought, a young man in a grey-upholstered compartment, did all these dramas and denouements leave me? Just yesterday I’d been a poor youth without a history, a neophyte at the mysteries, as Professor Codicil had put it in his typically grandiloquent way. I was just another simple lad who didn’t even know why the Blue Danube had to be blue. Now, over the course of a single sleepless night (and mine, I realized, could hardly have been the only one), I had somehow acquired a little history after all. It was a modest portion, true enough – nothing compared with what had upturned Europe just a year before: the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the ending of the Cold War, the opening up of the Eastern frontier I was just about to cross. In Britain, after all, we don’t hurry at history like that; but change had come, just the same. And the Iron Lady had made history, no doubt about that. Her rise, and now her fall, had been a great performance, made of conspiracy and pride, hubris and treachery, the ideal stuff for the media’s endless narrative, some of which I had written myself. Yes, for me too, Eine Ära ist zu Ende; an era had come to an end.

So what, then, would follow Der Thatcherismus? I looked again at the Austrian tabloid, and at once found the answer. What followed Der Thatcherismus was, of course, Der Post-Thatcherismus, the smart new epoch of which I had suddenly become a paid-up member. The thought made for strange emo­tions. Say what you would, the Thatcher Age had had a peculiar solidity; now the world seemed curiously indeterminate, no longer as stable and sure as it had been yesterday. I thought back again to the tour of Vienna that dear young Gerstenbacker had subjected me to the day before, when he was so desperately trying to please his master by diverting my mind from thoughts of Bazlo Criminale with the spectacles of a fin-de-siècle age. And it occurred to me now that, when centuries end, old orders do have a way of shaking and tumbling. In fact, when one considered it, there is nothing like observing a past suddenly slipping away and a great new millennium coming along for stirring the mind with troubled, if exciting, notions of change.