Word: historian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...vagabond poet who scrounges a living by running an outlaw school, reciting his Gaelic verses in the houses of the rich and pursuing neutral grain spirits and colleens with unflagging energy. Here, in the cool rationality of Moore Hall, is MacCarthy's fellow Catholic and countryman George Moore, historian of the French Revolution and Cassandra of its Irish offspring, dreading that "the spirit of Rousseau is in the very air these days, like dandelion puffballs." Recording the contagion, as one of the novel's several narrators, is the Rev. Arthur Vincent Broome, M.A. (Oxon.), dispatched from England...
Ordinarily, art histories are not the stuff of summer reading. But E.H. Gombrich is not the usual historian, and The Sense of Order is not a standard history. Subtitled "A study in the psychology of decorative art," this wittily illustrated volume ranges from a New Yorker cover of Saul Steinberg's to a wall inscription of Pompeii. Gombrich's central thesis concerns the need for order that resides in every human brain. Sometimes nature is accommodating: in hexagonal snowflakes, in the rhythmic chirping of crickets, in the natural laws of gravity and motion. Far more often...
Forty years afterward, the conflict that foreshadowed World War II still reverberates in this remarkable oral history. Traversing a scarred land that has endured everything and forgotten nothing, British Historian Ronald Fraser records the memories of survivors. He digs for the truth about Communist betrayals and fascist atrocities, executioners and victims. Many of the recollections are as sanguinary as the war: bombs strike a hospital, airplanes strafe civilians, firing squads are everywhere. Hitler and Stalin control the moves offstage, ever willing to sacrifice Spaniards to German and Soviet causes. Contradiction is the order of the day: "How do you explain...
That squeamishness only intensified during the Victorian era, blighting the whole form for the next 120 years. "In every picture there should be shade as well as light," said Boswell. The Victorians, however, wanted, or claimed they wanted, to hear only good about their heroes. The historian Thomas Carlyle was an exception; he instructed his own biographer, James Anthony Froude, to put down the truth about him. But when he died and Froude did just that, telling how sour, self-centered and occasionally violent the great man really was, half of England denounced Froude as a scoundrel and a traitor...
...were judged merely as a social recorder, he would not have a special place. One does not need to be a historian to know how narrow his field of social vision was. He ignored the public ostentation of his time, as well as the private misery. Most of his paintings are condensed sonnets in praise of the middle path, the sober life of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie, especially as embodied in his own household. He is said to have had a chirpy sense of humor, and there is certainly a sly and robust irony in his singeries, or monkey paintings...