Graham Stewart
Global Breakdown
Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism
By Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown 184pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
‘There are words nobody likes to be associated with in public, such as racism and imperialism. On the other hand, there are others for which everyone is anxious to demonstrate enthusiasm, such as mothers and the environment. Democracy is one of these.’ So writes Eric Hobsbawm, who has spent much of his long and distinguished life circumscribed by the title ‘Marxist historian’.
It seemed a bit cocky back in 1989 when Francis Fukuyama postulated that Communism’s collapse meant that, ideologically speaking, the world had ‘reached the end of history’. And it would be surprising if Professor Hobsbawm had now, upon his ninetieth birthday, suddenly concluded that liberal democrats had indeed won the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind