The religion he himself espoused was compounded of traditional non-Christian elements of piety and theology, such as might have been found in any fairly intellectual person in the preceding centuries, along with elements of Neoplatonism developed by Porphyry and Iamblichus of two or three generations earlier, and, finally, much of the organization and social ethic of the church.
When Amelia Hamilton-Morris and her husband William were starting a family, they had to choose between living in Iowa, where his family had settled three generations earlier, or in her native Houston.
This season extends that theme of buried memories much further, with a risky gambit: surreal flashbacks to a Holocaust trauma, two generations earlier in the Pfefferman line.
In 2029 – a century on from the first Great Depression – Douglas is sitting pretty in his plush care home on a family fortune built two generations earlier from the manufacture of diesel engines.
Warmly received in Liverpool by the Rathbone family, he was directed first to Edinburgh where his long brown hair and frontier manners captivated the town quite as comprehensively as that other rustic genius, Robert Burns, two generations earlier.
This was not a new argument — Darwin's grandfather Erasmus had suggested as much two generations earlier; the missing key, which both Darwin and Wallace would supply, was the way that evolution worked.
Instead, the files examined by Alexander Stephan were compiled two generations earlier by agencies of the American government and devoted to refugees from Nazi Germany whose role in enriching our cultural life has earned so much posthumous acclaim.
The senior Brown was a prominent Kentucky lawyer and politician; but he was also the son of a tenant farmer, and he had taught John, Jr., the same devotion to hard work that Colonel Sanders had learned two generations earlier.
European Jewry faced extinction at the hands of the Nazis, but Jews who had fled eastern Europe's pogroms for America two generations earlier already felt safe and established there.
Re "Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012: A Conjurer of Luminous Worlds, Both Beautiful and Terrifying," by Margalit Fox (obituary, front page, May 9): Maurice Sendak was one of the first writers in the juvenile category to trust children and their parents enough to address themes that might have frightened adults just one generation earlier.
