Word: historians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scandal is an express tour of the Profumo affair that moves with a pop historian's revisionist swagger and plays like News of the World headlines set to early '60s rock 'n' roll. Taking a cue from Asquith's Pygmalion, the film casts Ward (John Hurt) as an aristocratic makeover artist, discovering Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) in the fetid anonymity of a Soho strip club and turning her into a star of the jet-set slumming circuit. Pluck your eyebrows, Christine. Wet your lips. Come over and say hi to Jack Profumo...
...late Will Durant, the Book-of-the-Month Club's ubiquitous historian, once observed that "no man who is in a hurry is quite civilized." Time bestows value because objects reflect the hours they absorb: the hand-carved table, the handwritten letter, every piece of fine craftsmanship, every grace note. But now we have reached the stage at which not only are the luxuries of time disappearing -- for reading meaty novels, baking from scratch, learning fugues, traveling by sea rather than air, or by foot rather than wheel -- but the necessities of time are also out of reach. Family time...
CITIZENS, A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION by Simon Schama (Knopf; $29.95). Exactly 200 years after the bloody facts, a Harvard historian offers a fascinating, often surprising account of what went right -- and wrong -- during one of the world's most celebrated social convulsions...
History has played few tricks with as many odd twists and turns as the U.S.'s imperial adventure in the Philippines. In his first book since Vietnam: A History, journalist and historian Stanley Karnow chronicles 90 years of the U.S.'s relationship with its former colony with a keen eye for such incongruities. Beginning with a penetrating look at 300 years of cruel Spanish rule in the islands, Karnow sketches a history suffused with politics both Machiavellian and messianic: from Commodore George Dewey's whipping the Spaniards at Manila Bay in 1898 and America's later subversion of Emilio Aguinaldo...
...captured cannons, the elephant was designed to make Parisians forget their revolutionary past and dream of an imperial future. Its real destiny -- like the question of what to remember -- proved quite different. "By 1830, when revolution revisited Paris, the elephant was in an advanced state of decomposition," writes Harvard historian Simon Schama. "One tusk had dropped off, and the other was reduced to a powdery stump. Its body was black from rain and soot and its eyes had sunk, beyond all natural resemblance, into the furrows and pockmarks of its large, eroded head...