Universities Press Review
Universities Press Review 9 (September 2020)
Dear Reader,
Thank you for getting in touch. (If you have done so recently then you are doing your best to lead a normal life at an abnormal time – good for you.) I am currently working on a cultural history of modern France (a sort of companion to my book, The German Genius), which will be delivered to the publisher at the end of September 2020, and published – all being well – about a year after that. Meanwhile, here is a new feature for my website. If you have got in touch with me because you have read one or another of my books, the chances are that our interests overlap or coincide, in particular in regard to the history of ideas.
Titles reviewed in this edition
- Things Come Together: Africans Achieving Greatness in the Twenty-First Century, by Robert Rotberg
- The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance, by Catherine Fletcher
- History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, by Bruno Maçães
- Substate Dictatorship: Network, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union, by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk
- Fire: A Very Short Introduction, by Andrew C. Scott
- Restaging the Past: Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain, by Angela Bartie (Editor), Linda Fleming (Editor), Mark Freeman (Editor), Alexander Hutton (Editor), Paul Readman (Editor)
- The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible History of New England, by Meg Muckenhoupt
The Discovery of Fatherhood
Special feature
In my history books – some of them anyway – I have tried to draw attention to most of the important intellectual developments in the past, even the distant past.
One breakthrough, which I regard as arguably the most important breakthrough of all (for its effects on the way we think about ourselves and our social organisation), has received almost no reporting, and so I have created a special space for it here. It is just a few pages long, but if the argument is correct, the consequences are momentous. Read on …
READ AND RESPOND