Some seem as modern and iconoclastic as ever, others are like figures from ancient history. Donald Clarke rounds up the class of 1905.

Earlier this year, at the same time as Bob Hope was celebrating his 100th (and, as it turned out, final) birthday, newspaper arts pages were packed with celebrations, reappraisals and rediscoveries of various by-then- deceased cultural figures born in the same year as the great comedian.

How odd to think that, as Hope had just about demonstrated, figures such as George Orwell, Patrick Kavanagh and Glenn Miller could, lungs, livers and small aeroplanes willing, be still amongst us. One could just about credit that Cary Grant, always modern, never properly old, might still be about. But Johnny Weismuller? Fats Waller? They seem as dead as Milton.

The list of writers, artists and general notables whose centenaries we can look forward to in 2005 features a similarly intriguing combination of iconoclastic modernists and figures from ancient history. Glancing through the various potted biographies that are already beginning to emerge for the members of the class of 1905, one feels oneself subconsciously assembling a cultural history of the mid 20th century.

This generation came of age in the 1920s, but, rampant youth worship still being some 40 years distant, most of its number did not make an impact until the following decade. An exception was Greta Garbo (born August 18th 1905), who was already a huge star in Sweden before her mentor, Mauritz Stiller, brought her to Hollywood. Garbo, of course, went on to triumph in the talkies. Clara Bow (August 25th), the original It Girl, was less fortunate. After appearing in a series of vaguely risqué, hugely popular comedies throughout the 1920s, Bow, hampered by her Brooklyn accent and a perceived taste for high living, saw her career wilt with the coming of sound.

While young people in the West were drinking gin and dancing on tables, the Soviet Union was developing its austere identity. The mighty novel, And Quiet Flows the Don, by Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov (May 24th), remains a key text of the era.

Following misunderstandings at the US stock exchange in 1929, it looked for a while, as if the reds might be on to something. The ghastly devastation of the Great Depression pushed many of the 1905-ers to the left and caused some, such as American playwright Lillian Hellman (June 20th), embarrassment before Senator McCarthy some decades later.

The most evocative cinematic representation of those years of want probably came with John Ford's 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, in which Henry Fonda (May 16th) took the suffering of a nation on to his shoulders.

But, though already in their mid-30s and a little too old for the front line, many of the centenarians came to find the second World War the defining period in their lives.

Michael Powell (September 30th), arguably the very greatest of British movie directors, managed to get up Churchill's nose with his gently subversive 1943 masterpiece, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, before going on to direct further gems such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Meanwhile, the distinguished Joseph Cotten (May 15th) represented integrity in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and Robert Donat (March 18th), possessor of the sweetest voice in world cinema, broke hearts by dying gracefully in Goodbye Mr Chips (1939).

It is surprising how little great literature came out of the Blitz, but the 1943 novel, Caught, by old Etonian Henry Green (October 29th), who served in the London Fire Service during the war, skilfully evoked the previously unthinkable mingling of the classes that the crisis encouraged. The reputation of Green's novels - others include Loving and Party Going - has steadily increased in the years since his death in 1973.

Whereas we may see Powell seasons at the British Film Institute and new compendiums of Green's novels, it seems less likely that the good burghers of Nuremberg will be seeking to cash in on 100 years of Nazi architect Albert Speer (March 19th). Mind you, should you wish to pay homage, slivers of his influence are detectable in modernist buildings throughout the world.

Despite their advance into early middle age following the war, our centenarians managed to remain vital. Christian Dior (January 21st) devised the New Look and invited those women who could afford it to rediscover glamour in an era of shortages.

The American painter, Barnett Newman (January 29th), became the most formally disciplined of the Abstract Expressionists. Though his sober canvases, often featuring a cold vertical line, had none of the lunatic energy of Jackson Pollock, they still managed to appeal to the sort of bearded student whose main task in life was to make sense of Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21st). Being and Nothingness was first published in 1943, but it was in the 1950s and 1960s that Sartre's ideas moved, half-formed, later to be half-digested, from philosophy departments into popular culture. Sartre is just about the only person mentioned in this article who was a vital part of the 1960s counter-culture. Many students may have read Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler (September 5th), but his anti-communist sympathies would not have been welcome on the barricades in 1968.

But, strange to relate, one of the biggest-selling record albums of the 1960s was inspired by the life of someone born in 1905. No, not Sergeant Pepper. The soundtrack to the 1965 film, The Sound of Music, the story of caterwauling nun Maria Von Trapp (January 26th), confirmed squares in their view that this rock-'n'-roll business was all a fad by keeping the Beatles off the top spot for 70 weeks.

Who have we forgotten? Mad leave-the-weak-on-the-ice-floe writer Ayn Rand (February 2nd). Even madder I-keep-my-wee-in-bottles squillionaire Howard Hughes (December 24th). And, of course, the most unfairly derided British novelist of the last century.

Sir Anthony Powell (December 21st) who, having died as recently as 2000, came closest to making it into this list with air in his lungs, was the author of the blissfully witty, numbingly huge roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time. Derided as a pointless snob by the same people who endure Proust's endless lists of duchesses without complaint, Powell would rather have enjoyed scrutinising the notables detailed here and turning them into cool, cleanly drawn comic monsters. Come to think of it, wasn't the nervous, socially inept Hugh Moreland, a character in the middle volumes of the Dance, modelled directly on the English composer, Constant Lambert (August 23rd)? What would Powell have made of Myrna Loy (August 2nd)? Or Ray Milland (January 3rd)? Or . . . We could go on.