Contributions by:
Robin Melville
As I read Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography* I found myself sometimes puzzled, sometimes irritated, and eventually saddened. Over the years I have appreciated the works that brought him his reputation as a left historian. Unfortunately, his autobiography does not enhance that reputation. Hobsbawm’s has certainly been a life crowded with incident. There cannot be many whose…
Read Full Article...Dear Anne Norton, I found your book an engaging read for the memories it evoked and for the information it provided on the mindset of people whom we need to examine seriously. You brings to life the milieu from which Straussianism emerged, stirring vivid memories of the University of Chicago’s Political Science department some 30 years…
Read Full Article...De te fabula narratur? Ferguson’s stated purpose is “to write the history of globalization as it was promoted by Great Britain and her colonies,” not to write yet another history of the British Empire (p. xxvi). Thus does he begin to intimate here and in related introductory passages that that Empire was but a factor,…
Read Full Article...I find to my bemusement that many Americans seem to have strong views on Brexit, which most of them seem to oppose. What was an American friend imagining when he told me, on the day the outcome of the Brexit referendum became known, that I must be proud to be Scottish because a majority of…
Read Full Article...Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (Crown Publishers, 2012) Twilight of the Elites is a book intended to influence progressive understanding and action and has been positively received as such by influential progressive celebrities among others. Such positive evaluations are quite at odds with my assessment of what Hayes has wrought.…
Read Full Article...The Invisible Bridge, the book jacket informs us, “is the story of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Thus are we introduced to the third volume of Rick Perlstein’s exploration of the birth and growth of contemporary American conservatism, centering on the rise of Ronald Reagan. (He has produced other books centering on…
Read Full Article...This is a dispiriting book. How could it not be, arriving as it did—upon a scene already deeply etched by “economic, political, and cultural and not least ecological ” (p. 255)—amidst a pandemic of unfathomable personal, social, and economic consequences in the face of which the political leaderships of some of the world’s most vainglorious…
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