One characteristic of the historical writing of the Eighties was an expanding readiness to relate the politics of the past to its literature: to the literature of ideas and imagination. The social and economic explanations of political behaviour which had been dominant in the previous decades had left too much unexplained. A growing number of historians turned to literature, as to art and religion, to understand the structures of thought and emotion which distinguish one age from another, and without a grasp of which the political language of the past can be unintelligible. More interest is now taken in the culture of a period than in its economics, while the study of high politics seems jejune when it lacks a cultural dimension.

LRB 10 May 1990 | PDF Download