MixedThe London Review of BooksAdam Hochschild has taken most of the material for his new book from published sources; but about that I have no inclination to complain. Far from it. The findings of specialist historians have constantly to be ‘translated’ for the benefit of general readers, and Hochschild has done a valuable job in combining a biography of Leopold with a coherent, comprehensible account of how he realised his dream of a vast and ultimately profitable empire in the middle of Africa ... Unfortunately the book has faults which run almost as deep as its merits. Hochschild’s naive zeal for cliché is accompanied by lunges into a general metaphoric confusion ... He rebukes the Victorians for their overweening contempt for African society and culture, but it never occurs to him that his attitude to the Victorians might be tainted by an analogous philistinism and incomprehension. He refers slightingly to ‘European maps’ of the period which showed the interior of Africa as ‘blank’ – as if there were African maps or Moghul maps or Chinese maps which did any better ... Newton said that he saw as far as he did because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Here we have the spectacle of someone standing on the shoulders of giants and kicking them for their pains.
