S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social […]

Michael Scammell is to be congratulated for this magnificent biography. […]

God and Man According to Tolstoy, by Alexander Boot; Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 215 pages, £50.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,

And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

—Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel

Genius and mediocrity frequently coincide in the same person. Alex Boot takes Leo (Lev) Tolstoy as a very striking case in point. Tolstoy was probably the greatest novelist of all time. Most of his readers in English have probably not gone beyond War and Peace and Anna Karenina, although his last major novel, Resurrection, sold more copies than the two acclaimed “great” novels put together. Perhaps surprisingly, most of Tolstoy’s writing, especially once he had passed fifty, was not only non-fiction but, according to Boot, spectacularly bad non-fiction, portentous work affecting to attend to humanity’s spiritual, moral and political needs and pronouncing loudly on everything.

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism,

by Michael Burleigh;

Harper Press, 2008, £25.

From all that terror teaches,

From lies of tongue and pen,

From all the easy speeches,

That comfort cruel men,

From sale and profanation,

Of honour and the sword,

From sleep and from damnation,

Deliver us, good lord!

            —G.K. Chesterton, “A Hymn” (1915)

In this painstakingly researched book, Michael Burleigh examines most of the versions of terrorism of the last two centuries. From Ireland he makes his way via the nineteenth-century Russian nihilists and revolutionaries, and then the anarchists, to the weird spoilt-brat Marxists of continental Europe a few decades back. He looks at some of the terrorists who featured in the dismantling of the great European empires. One cannot do it all, and, sadly, there is nothing on the Mau Mau or on Eoka. There is, however, a chilling account of the destruction of French Algeria, a country standing in its late days on the verge of economic modernity.

This short book, from the fertile pen of Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, is about historical counterfactuals, in other words about the philosophy of history. A counterfactual is a proposition running counter to, or substantively “replacing”, in our imagination or investigations, what is in fact the case. The philosophy underlying the views of those who find historical counterfactuals—what did not happen—crucial in the understanding of the actual record—what did happen—is “radical indeterminacy”, the view, roughly speaking, that history is an open question because human beings are free.

He brought light out of darkness, not out of a […]