PositiveThe New RepublicEngland today, Bullough proposes, \'is like a butler,\' a figure who \'does not concern himself with the moral character of his clients.\' That may be a little unfair to butlers, not such a bad lot in my limited experience, and what Bullough really means is that, beyond financial and legal services, London is also selling the remains of its cultural capital: the deference or obsequiousness of its professional class conferring on their business associates an aura of respectability or patrician glamour. The more apt word for members of this class would be enabler or opportunist: Butler to the World is really a story about the legacy of empire and the sorry state of a country that finds itself acting as a factotum for the international plutocracy ... Bullough describes a system before the 1950s in which \'financial institutions were largely guided by gentle pressure toward doing the ‘right thing,’\' with no need for formal agreements, since \'a chap’s word was his bond.\' But the City lost its global financial supremacy to Wall Street after two world wars ... In some rather predictable passages, Bullough derides the antiquated patrician elite who used to run the City, and he illustrates what he thinks was their haughty condescension to social inferiors by describing their tendency to address people by their surnames ... In one respect, Bullough’s book is more topical than he could have imagined when it went to press ... At the time of writing, we have just learned that the Conservative Party received a major donation from a Russian source, with links to the pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician Sergei Kopytov. While this may be an example of how Bullough’s \'butler\' analogy doesn’t quite work—a butler accepts tips from guests but doesn’t run the country—it illustrates in the most lurid way a larger story.
Andrew Bacevich
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewSome of Bacevich’s points are the sharper for being personal ... one can only hope that Bacevich is read and understood by a generation young enough to see through and reject those dismal elites.
Alan Allport
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... unusually informative and stimulating ... They say there’s no disputing taste and, just as I don’t share Allport’s fondness for the Shire, I don’t share his loathing for Chamberlain, who had another side, a deep love of nature ... Quite a few other received ideas are deftly skewered ... valuable.
David Cannadine
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMuch of the narrative frame concerns high politics, and rightly so. A book like this one is particularly valuable in an age when history undergraduates often startle their teachers by their ignorance of basic facts ... In Cannadine’s lucid account there is the occasional slip (the 1833 Irish Church Temporalities Act suppressed 10 bishoprics, not 18). And there’s one subject that he deals with cursorily at the very end, but that was of the greatest importance in the second part of the century: the growth of organized games. He mentions the publication of Mill’s Utilitarianism in 1863, but not another and surely more important event that year, the meeting at a London pub that drew up a common code for association football. As A. J. P. Taylor said, 'By it the mark of England may well remain in the world when the rest of her influence has vanished' — words that may be given further force this summer.
Michael Kazin
MixedThe NationAt the outset, Kazin says that he believes the United States should not have taken part in the war [WWI], and his account of the failed but ardent movement that tried to prevent the country from joining it is impressive and moving, although it also presents difficulties: Kazin can more easily admire radical and feminist opponents than someone like Kitchin, a North Carolina Democrat and intransigent segregationist ... As he makes clear, Kazin isn’t writing as an unconditional pacifist, nor does he think that all wars are wrong. Instead, his argument contrasts the 'bad war' the United States entered in 1917 with the 'good war' it entered in 1941 ... There may be lessons in all this, although perhaps not the ones that Kazin thinks ... One may share Kazin’s admiration for the noble spirit of these warriors for peace while reluctantly disagreeing with them.
