The book brilliantly uses episodes from O’Toole’s own life to bring to life the way Ireland has changed from being a conservative, Catholic country, to a more modern, liberal, and open-minded society.
The many beautifully written short chapters could each be read as stand-alone essays but together they tell a much larger story which possibly has lessons for other countries that have gotten stuck in the past.
Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government-in despair, because all the young people were leaving-opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history.
As someone who has studied and written about the economist, Maynard Keynes, the name of Frank Ramsey (brother of the more famous Archbishop Michael Ramsey) was already very familiar, but this book brought him to life.
Clearly, it helps to have an interest in philosophy and economics, the subjects to which Ramsey contributed so much, but, unusually for an academic, his tragic and short life alone is fascinating. As Tom Stoppard says on the back cover, “it is a wonderful book that lights up the brain and breaks the heart.”
When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set. For the first time Cheryl Misak tells the full story of his extraordinary life.
The motivation for this book is the idea that it was liberals who bore much of the responsibility for the First World War and its aftermath.
Using a metaphor inspired by Trotsky’s famous quotation about war being the locomotive of history, Peter Clarke weaves together the careers of five of those liberals: two American Presidents, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt; two British Prime Ministers, David Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill; and the economist, Maynard Keynes.
It might seem odd to bracket an economist with such eminent world leaders, but Clarke makes a powerful case that the careers of all five men were entangled with those of the others and with the wars that blighted the twentieth century.
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year for 2017
'War, comrades,' declared Trotsky, 'is a great locomotive of history.' He was thought to be acknowledging the opportunity the First World War had offered the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia in 1917. Twentieth-century warfare, based on new technologies and mass armies, certainly saw the locomotive power of war geared up to an unprecedented level.
Peter Clarke explores the crucial ways in which war can be seen as a prime mover of history in the twentieth century through the eyes of five major figures. In Britain two wartime prime ministers…
Most people have heard of Adam Smith, Robert Malthus, Karl Marx and Maynard Keynes, but how do they fit into a bigger story of how economic ideas have changed over the centuries – centuries during which the world has changed almost beyond recognition? And what has happened to economic thinking since their times?
This book, which has been updated to take account of recent scholarship on the subject, tries to answer these questions in a way that is accessible to readers who have only a fleeting acquaintance with the subject.
This book is marketed outside North America as The Penguin History of Economics.
