Atkinson's novel and the British obsession with the World Wars

Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins is a multi-generation story but she successfully avoids the boring tedium of straightforward chronology, the inevitable march of life, and tells the story in segments - large segments, long chapters - each focused on a different family member, different generation, but there are natural points of contact or areas of overlap as obviously different characters in the family appear in one another's segments (they don't tell their story, it's the more elegant 3rd person) at different ages. Whether Atkinson can build a plot and narrative - I'm not sure yet - but she's very good at creating a sense of time and place and at delineating character: the people from 1920 feel just as real and present as the people living on a commune circa 1980. I will blog more about this in future posts, but have to remark on one aspect - and I think I've posted on this before - but I continue to be amazed at the English/British obsession with the 2 World Wars. I can understand a generation or two ago why WWII was a major theme in English fiction but at this point there's literally no one living who can tell directly about the first World War and very few with direct knowledge of the 2nd, for that matter - and still it seems every other British novel or show has something to do w/ one war or another or, as in this novel, w/ both. Obviously highly traumatic events for the English - incredible losses of male population, the bombing of cities, English bravery, the suffering after the war, the diminished empire - but seriously WWII was 75 years ago, so why is this topic still on the literary forefront as if it's current events?