A
great many of the anecdotes we heard in school and university about famous
figures probably aren't true, and that's particularly the case when we're
talking about people who lived many centuries earlier. But where to to find out?
Now, maybe most people aren't curious about
Petrarch and Laura, Heloise and Abelard, or William Tell. Still, I was, and Octave
Delepierre devoted years in painstaking research trying to find out the
truth.
He lays out what the situation
most probably was and gives plausible explanations for the stories. It turns out that all of them are just tall
tales, but what's really impressive is he doesn't hesitate to say that, in many
cases, we don't really know what actually happened.
It's a fascinating book and also a model for
what good scholarship is.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
Partly
as a result of one of my numerous misguided educational choices and partly out of
genuine interest, I did a lot of work in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English literature. I wish I’d
had Ashton’s book, as it’s a social history of England back then and a basic
anthology of what was being reported at the time, with dozens of reproductions
of drawings.
Jane Austen is a favorite
novelist of mine, and when you look at the section on women’s fashions, it
definitely changes how you see her women—and how the men saw them.
At the same time, the picture of an England
beset by riots, mutinies, and social chaos is not only a useful corrective but
a potent reminder of how little our society has changed.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and…
At nearly 500 pages, it's a tough read, but both
the anecdotes and the capsule descriptions of the people make for fascinating
reading.
On balance, Ings was probably
tight to handle the topic this way and let the readers draw their own
conclusions. I have two: although
Marxism-Leninism claimed to be "scientific, the sconce basically consisted of
eccentric ideas from the nineteenth century, and in key areas, Soviet scientists
never got past that.
A conclusion that
leads me to my second observation is that scientists are easy to control and will support
whatever the political leadership says. Of course, Stalin's habit of eliminating people definitely helped, but
it's not difficult to see how this principle works in societies that are less brutal.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
War-torn, unstable and virtually bankrupt, revolutionary Russia tried to light its way to the future with the fitful glow of science. It succeeded through terror, folly and crime - but also through courage, imagination and even genius. Stalin believed that science should serve the state and with many disciplines having virtually unlimited funds, by the time of his death in 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in history - at once the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world. The human cost of this peculiar…
