Sublime

But the strange designlike quality of the Thirties continued to the end. It was as though history had put up markers, dramatic milestones at either end of the decade. It started with the collapse not only of financial structure, but of a whole way of thought and action. It ended with perhaps the last Great War.

These paradoxes became very apparent during the Warsaw Rising of 1944. The Polish Home Army had assumed that it was fighting ‘the Germans’, and the appalling massacres of civilians that took place are generally denounced as ‘German atrocities’. Yet the picture looks rather different if examined in detail. The Wehrmacht was loath to release units fr

Howard K. Smith, who fled Nazi Germany on the last train from Berlin before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941; James Cameron, whose iconic 1946 report from the Bikini atom tests was perhaps the most literary and philosophical article ever published in a newspaper.

In order to develop histories that are adequate to this challenge, we have to learn to link our existing subjecthood – the I of history – in many different scales and temporalities, from natural and geological ones to those of local ecologies; from changing capitalist production cycles to rhythms of sustainable institutions, practices and modes of

Thus, even while there may have been extraordinarily sophisticated evidentiary historians in the past such as Thucydides, Sima Qian or Ibn Khaldun, they understood the past in a radically different way from the moderns.

The relatively small-scale political institutions of Rome, little changed since the fourth century BCE, were hardly up to governing the peninsula of Italy. They were even less capable of controlling and policing a vast empire. As we shall see, Rome relied more and more on the efforts and talents of individuals whose power, profits and rivalries thr

Europe, as noted earlier, has in a short span of time gone from being the most predictable and stable region—one where history seemed to have truly ended (as suggested in an influential essay published in 1989 by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama)—to something dramatically different. Democracy, prosperity, and peace all seemed firml