Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie is probably the cleverest and certainly the most versatile French historian of our day. Beginning with his thèse on the peasants of Languedoc in Early Modern times,...
The historian Edward Hallett Carr died on 3 November 1982, at the age of 90. He had an oddly laconic obituary in the Times, which missed out a great deal. If he had died ten years before, his...
In The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy in 1952 the late Jacob Talmon offered an influential diagnosis of ‘the most vital issue of our time ... the headlong collision between empirical and...
E. H. Carr died on 3 November last. I am inclined to say that he was the greatest British historian of our age: certainly he was the one I most admired. Ted Carr had a long run, varied enough to...
Of the 53 short essays, book reviews, lectures and obituaries assembled in Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s two volumes, two were published in the year before he assumed the Regius Professorship of Greek...
The French Enlightenment? Think of Huber’s famous picture of the dîner des philosophes: there is Voltaire, one arm raised to heaven, and alongside him, around the well-provided table,...
Daniel O’Keefe’s massive survey of magic not only tells us ‘how to do it’ but gives us some policy recommendations too. His book reads like the transcript of a Royal...
Can it be doubted that to write about ‘the English Spirit’ (or L’Ame Française or ‘the Spanish Soul’) is intellectually disreputable? Plainly, there are no...
It was a gloomy afternoon in early spring, 1968, Peking, China. I was taking a nap with my new-born baby when somebody knocked wildly at the door. It was a group of Red Guards, in green army...
Even to speak of Dark Age economics must raise the eyebrows of a general reader who is accustomed (not unreasonably) to think that the age is called dark because we hardly know about its...
A Calabrian who now lives in Rome told me a revealing story about the Mafia. An uncle, aged 90, rang up from the ancestral village absolutely furious. ‘Do you know, Vincenzo,’ he...
Retirement, like other less pleasant conditions, is something one never seriously expects to suffer. After a lifetime of compliance with constraints which, however gentle, were not of one’s...
While walking down Sackville Street in London in 1942, Nicholas Jenkins’s attention was unequivocally demanded by the hurricane-like imminence of a thickset general, obviously of high...
It is a current preoccupation on the Left, more fashionable now among many students of English than Post-Structuralism, that English Literature as an academic subject is a conspiracy of the...
The thorough understanding of a difficult text, even of one written in one’s own language, may be made far easier by a good commentary. Eliot himself provided, if not a commentary, useful...
‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the...
Territorial disputes are, in the Spanish phrase, matters de mucha teologia. These matters of much theology can easily cause violence; short statements about them are nearly always wrong; intensive...
The modest title of Hans Aarsleff’s book From Locke to Saussure conceals, among other things, the fact that it goes a long way beyond Saussure. Its implications reach right down to...