The Scrapbook is especially pleased to note that our friends at Encounter Books have just published a collection of 20 recent essays by Gertrude Himmelfarb—Past and Present: The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists. Of those 20 pieces, 11 first appeared in the pages of this magazine.
Himmelfarb—historian, philosopher, scholar of ideas, trenchant essayist, wife of Irving Kristol, and mother of Bill—needs no introduction here. But the real value of her new book is her extraordinary gift for explaining the present by examining the past, and her rare ability to transport thinkers and doers from history—Walter Bagehot, Winston Churchill, Lionel Trilling, Benjamin Disraeli—to help us understand our own perplexing times.
Best of all, it’s a great read: Himmelfarb is a prose magician, and her insights and judgments are pleasurable and illuminating, even funny, in equal measure.
