PAST PRESENT – Readings in History

A taste for the lurid, macabre and gruesome is not readily admitted in the Georgian drawing rooms of Lanark. On the outside chance that there is one person harbouring a furtive taste for some of life’s juicier details, let me introduce you to this work of history by Lisa Appignanesi (http://lisaappignanesi.com/), Trials of Passion. The author examines the

It’s an ingenious, if risky, premise to propose to tell the story of a single season in a single year that will somehow illuminate the character of a nation. Other years have their own popularity – 1922 as the ‘year of modernism’ perhaps, or 1963 as the year ‘sex began’ (according to Philip Larkin). Narrowing

Dr. Neil MacGregor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_MacGregor and http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/management/directors/neil_macgregor.aspx and ), http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/jan/02/neil-macgregor-british-museum-history Director of the British Museum, offers this sumptuous history of Germany through objects and art. Whilst Germany’s past is too often seen through the prism of the two World Wars, this book investigates a wider six hundred-year-old history of the nation through its objects. It examines the key moments that

This appealed to me because it deals with the 5 years immediately preceding my birth. What was going on as I lay ‘mewling and puking’, uncomprehending of the world around? David Kynaston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kynaston) offers this whopping 880 page social history to set the scene. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period in their own right: neither