“... wealth. This is not, I think, what voters in Sunderland and Cornwall voted for. Enthusiasts like Jacob Rees-Mogg compare Brexit to the repeal of the Corn Laws. They tend not to dwell on the terrible agricultural depression that set in after the American railways and steamships started bringing corn from the Midwest into the country in the 1870s. Thousands of ...”

“... of the noblest legacies of that cultural epoch’, according to the 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, who did much to give the book its status. And yet Pico’s writings, as Brian Copenhaver has persuasively shown, are in essence medieval. Enlightenment philosophes joked about fusty theologians debating angels dancing on the head of a ...”

“... to explain cultural change, it is partly because he couldn’t escape the shadow of another book: Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). While Braudel devoted his life to a ‘science of history’, Burckhardt practised history as portraiture, taking an era as his subject. Often ...”