5 days in London

This book by John Lukacs has pointed James to a new focus for our PM paper for Rethinking History.
Some quotes: “…from macrocosmic to microcosmic history, of a sort” (p. xii).
“Tightly focused views are often useful, while there is a kind of broadmindedness that can be flat” (p. xiii).
The title of chapter one, “The Hinge of Fate” evokes a very PM-like imagery. 🙂
“Any historian worth his salt knows how to eschew monocausal explanations of human events – that is, the attribution of a single motive to any given decision.* And there is another necessary distinction, the one between motives and purposes (the first a push of the past, the second the pull of the future), for rare are also those instances when the purposes of a decision are singular or exclusive” (p. 41-41).
*Footnote references Bond, Britain, France and Belgium.