Despite his exotic name, Felipe Fernández-Armesto is an upper-class Englishman of the kind who seem to float on a cloud of contentment, perpetually entertained by the oafish antics of the rest of us down below. His press release describes him as 'a member of the Modern History Faculty of Oxford University' and Millennium, his blockbuster on the history of the world, as a 'highly acclaimed' bestseller, while translations of his monographs and reference books are 'pending in twenty languages'. But he is not just a historian. He is also something of a philosopher, and his publishers have now given him the chance to address the world in a format that other authors only dream of: a brief and opinionated essay, with a smart design but a popular price, on the epistemological ills of modern civilisation. I shall not try to conceal my feelings: reader, I envy him.

LRB 13 November 1997 | PDF Download