Writing about Basil Davidson's work for the LRB blog a few days after his death last month, I'd a sense that there was more to say. The record is magnificent: his sterling work in occupied Yugoslavia for the Special Operations Executive during the war, his books about this period, and then, famously, the histories of precolonial Africa and the writings on the anti-colonial liberation movements. It's as if he'd had the energy to live two lives in the space of one, and then, in his eighties, to stretch his legs with well-turned pieces for this paper.

LRB 5 August 2010 | PDF Download