PositiveThe NationCompellingly narrated and meticulously researched—among other things, Evans draws from a half-century of MI5 surveillance reports—the book provides a more nuanced portrait of Hobsbawm’s political and intellectual development, revealing that Hobsbawm was a far more ambivalent communist and a far more pragmatic socialist than either his critics or his champions recognized ...
Richard Aldous
PositiveThe Nation...[a] compellingly narrated and well-researched biography ... Aldous does not focus on these years with the same level of intensity or care for detail that he directs toward Schlesinger’s earlier years, dedicating only 50 or so pages to the last four decades of his life. One can understand why: Schlesinger’s salad days ran parallel to the heyday of mid-20th–century liberalism; they were more exciting times, at least for Schlesinger. But one suspects that Aldous, a contributing editor to The American Interest, is also more interested in tracking liberal realism’s rise instead of its fall. Nonetheless, despite the brevity of Aldous’s last chapters, one does get the sense that Schlesinger was trying, in his later years, to come to terms with the bellicose liberalism he’d championed much of his life.
