A personal account by the Harvard Medical School lecturer and political activist traces his explorations into the psychological sources and consequences of some of the past half-century's most disturbing events as experienced by its victims and perpetrators.

Orwell's politics is a study of George Orwell's political ideas and beliefs from his time as a policeman in Burma through to the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It places Orwell's politics in historical context, examining his response to Imperialism, to mass unemployment in the 1930s, to revolution in Spain and to the Second World War and its aftermath. The book considers Orwell's belief that socialist revolution was the only road to victory in wartime Britain. It discusses his time at the BBC and at the leftwing Labour newspaper Tribune. Particular attention is paid to Orwell's American connection, to his writings for Partisan Review and for Politics. Orwell's belief that Russia had nothing in common with socialism is discussed and new sources for Nineteen Eighty-Four are identified. The book also discusses recent feminist critiques of Orwell's politics. Newsinger demonstrates that, while Orwell's political beliefs inevitably changed over the years, he remained a committed socialist up to the time of his death. Orwell's anti-Stalinism was a consequence of his socialism rather than a repudiation of it.

The author draws comparisons and parallels between culture today and past historical events of the 20th century.

In this eloquent and thought-provoking "autohistory," John Lukacs, distinguished historian and writer, describes the history of his own convictions and beliefs. The journey takes us from the Hungary of the 1930s and the ravaged Budapest of World War II to Lukacs’s discovery of the New World, his forays into the intellectual life of New York City, and finally his settling in Philadelphia. Along the way, Lukacs examines many of the major currents of our period, including fascism, communism, democracy, anti-Semitism, and the Christian realism from which springs the book’s title. What emerges is a mind that brings to bear on the conflicts of the twentieth century the erudition of the European heritage and the independence of the American. In prose as elegant as it is supple, Confessions of an Original Sinner is at once the vivid account of one man’s voyage and an important contribution to that small library that brings into sharp focus the major intellectual developments of our time.

The Course of Our Times

For many years the term fin de siècle has been used to imply a state of decadence which was thought to have pervaded 'civilised' European society in the years around 1900. This volume of essays, which draw on a very wide range of disciplines, argues that the period was in fact one of dramatic change, essentially positive and forward-looking in character. This was the period of the rise of the giant corporation, of mass production and mass consumption, and of the development of the generation and distribution of electrical energy. Novel social features such as mass politics, mass media, and mass sport involved the body of ordinary people and in the arts, complex reactions to contemporary social reality were aroused and expressed. This was also the period which gave birth to the study of quantum mechanics, relativity physics, mental processes and genetics. This volume forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which began with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981) and has continued with Romanticism in National Context (1988). They bring together comparative, national and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and actions.

In this book historian John Lukacs presents a series of fictionalized vignettes of daily life as experienced by ordinary individuals in the United States (although Lukacs takes us to some European countries as well), each in a year from 1901 to 1969, and each followed by a short dialogue in which the author argues with an interlocutor (who may or may not be himself) over why he has chosen to develop a given scenario in that particular year and what its significance might be.

The importance of Melvin J. Lasky and of the journals he has edited (Encounter in London, Der Monat in Berlin) has been beautifully captured by a young European intellectual, Dr. Michael Naumann: "Lasky's work, quite apart from its value as a meditation, is a testimony of personal courage. This is the work of an outsider, of a thinker in crazed times, who ranks with the few who can apply that 16th-century observation of Richard Hooker to themselves with every justification: 'Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream.'..."On The Barricades, And Off, is an extraordinary collection of writings by Lasky dealing with Revolutionaries and Ideologies, with the German Problem and the Russian Question, with Travelling and Climates of Opinion. But there is nothing eclectic or random about this effort. Indeed the essays are stitched together by an impassioned dedication to the open society and, no less, a universal, even-handed critique of all closed societies.Born in New York City, Melvin J. Lasky has been co-editor of Encounter in London (called "the most brilliant European periodical") since he succeeded Irving Kristol in 1958. He was educated at the City College of New York, at the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. He was the literary editor of the New Leader before serving in World War II as a combat historian in France and •Germany. After the war he was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, The Reporter, Partisan Review, and other publications. His work as an editor and writer reflects that unusual group of cosmopolitan scholars and men of letters who emerged from the ashes of conflict to help recreate the intellectual climate for democracy in Europe, indirectly reestablishing transatlantic critical standards in America.

Selected essays from the eminent British historian ranging from his specialty of 18th century England as well as his comments on being an historian and reviews of books.