Why Did the Samaritan Cross the Road? David Wootton, Power, Pleasure and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018, pp. 386. This is a book on the (very large) subject of “the Enlightenment” and its moral consequences. That it is a traditional scholarly work can be judged […]
Author: Lincoln Allison
Frances Welch, Imperial Tea Party
Frances Welch, Imperial Tea Party, family, politics and betrayal: the ill-fated British and Russian royal alliance, Short Books, 2018, pp. 282. Although rather amateurishly presented in several respects this is a fascinating and well-researched slice of history. It covers the three meetings of the British royal family with their Romanov cousins in the years before […]
James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany
Lincoln Allison, emeritus reader in politics, University of Warwick, is reading James Hawes’ The Shortest History of Germany (Old Street Publishing, 2017) I was given this book in a pub by a friend who had just finished it: brushing up on German history with a quick summary seemed an excellent idea. Except that it is […]
Belonging
“Ourness” Cultural sociologists devote considerable attention to “otherness” – the sense of being alien, different or excluded from the norm. “Country” and “countryside” both descend linguistically from the Latin equivalent of otherness. There is much less attention given to the sense of “ourness” which relates individuals to populations and places. What follows here are personal […]
On References, Obituaries and “Personal” Statements
When I was a young man an elderly academic once took me aside and asked me if I had ever been required to write a Times obituary. It was a crazy question though not actually the craziest question an elderly academic ever asked me. That would be, “Lincoln, did you ever meet Winston?” The great […]
The Strange Fate of the One Day Game
A Saturday in May and I made my way to Edgbaston to watch Warwickshire play Lancashire in the Royal London One Day Cup as befits a retired cricketer. It was cold and there were short, sharp showers which included some hail. The crowd were a pleasant lot with something of a Commonwealth flavour: I identified […]
A Lament for Academic Life
When he was in his early twenties one of my sons said something to me that must count among the stranger things that sons ever say to fathers. Asked what he wanted to do with his life he replied, “I want to be exactly like you, Dad”, putting some vehemence into the adverb. And why […]
Pareto & Co.
On an edition of University Challenge in 2013 there was a question on elite theory. I was pleased and relieved that the student competitors had heard of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca and Robert Michels, even if they mixed them up a bit. All of this intellectual triumvirate were born in the mid-nineteenth century and they […]
Son of . . .
Lincoln Allison, essayist and retired academic. I normally have lots of books on the go, but the pick of the current crop is Mick Channon Jnr., How’s Your Dad? Embracing Failure in the Shadow of Success (Racing Post, 2016). Reasons for reading it: “Here, Dad, you’ll like this” plus I once included Mick Channon Snr., […]
The Play’s the Thing
Brenda James and William D. Rubinstein, The Truth Will Out: Unmasking the Real Shakespeare, Pearson Longman, 2005 (2006 pb), pp. 360. On more than one occasion at a conference I have been buttonholed by someone who has insisted on informing me, with a glint in their eye, that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were […]