Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

The making of modern myths

Tony Judt
Heinemann, 446pp, £20,

Jonathan Mirsky

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Jonathan Mirsky on the new book by Tony Judt

Who are the big intellectuals today? There are academics, to be sure, each with their speciality, and journalists, ditto. When something comes up the BBC will call on them to pontificate, to explain, but only on their speciality. Off their own piste they are no more valuable than a saloon-bar or dinner-party bore, eager to tell you ‘what I always say’. I don’t exempt myself.

Tony Judt, now a professor at New York University, is the rare real thing, the author of 11 books on Marxism and French intellectuals, European resistance and revolution, language in a multi-state world; he is to consider what has happened in post-war Britain, the US, Israel and France.

In this book, a collection of previously published essays grouped by themes, he looks closely at some of the big minds of the 20th century — Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Primo Levi and Edward Said (who reads them now?) and weighs up their values. I found his chapter on Koestler, whose great novel Darkness at Noon is especially insightful, critical and measured. He dismisses a critic who disparaged Koestler for having a rackety sex-life, but says, too, that while Darkness at Noon blackens the way the Soviets treated Communists, Koestler is

silent on the famines, the expropriations, the wholesale deportations of peoples authorised by Stalin. The skeletons are those of Communists, mostly of Communist intellectuals.

Judt is the master of ‘but’. He begins his chapter on Eric Hobsbawm by calling him ‘the best known historian in the world’. He hails Hobsbawm’s brilliance and style, noting that he was an Apostle at Cambridge, where his contemporary (and later my supervisor) Noel Annan recalled him as being ‘armed cap-à-pied with the Party’s interpretation of current politics’. But — this is the but — Judt zeros in on Hobsbawm’s ultimate weakness: ‘Eric Hobsbawm was not just a Communist — there have been quite a lot of those, even in Britain. He stayed a Communist for 60 years.’ Hobsbawm, he reminds us, once said, ‘There are certain clubs of which I would not wish to be a member.’ By this, Judt observes, Hobsbawm meant ex-Communists, thus distancing himself from Camus, Koestler and Silone. ‘By excluding himself from such company’, Judt states, ‘Eric Hobsbawm, of all people, has provincialised himself.’

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment | Apollo Art Books

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Life and Letters

Allan Massie

Breaking the rules

Brave new writing

Richard Bradford

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how.