One of the most familiar activities of a historian is extracting precious metal from the deep mines of unpublished materials held in archives. But Hobsbawm himself was never an archive hound: his preferred strategy was to read an astonishing range of printed sources in several languages and then produce an original and challenging interpretation out of them. Reflecting in old age on his own practice, he declared: “I would most like to describe myself as a kind of guerilla historian, who doesn’t so much march directly towards his goal behind the artillery fire of the archives, as attack it from the flanking bushes with the Kalashnikov of ideas.”
The Guardian, “Eric Hobsbawm by Richard J Evans review – Marxist intellectual, national treasure“, 15 februari 2019
Vad är Baldwin-receptet? Legeringen av självbiografi, politik och journalistik?
DN, “Ta-Nehisi Coates: ‘Föreställ dig en svart president som öppet erkänner sexuella övergrepp – det är omöjligt’“, 16 februari 2019
– Ja, men också inslaget av poesi och lyrik. Det kallas stil, ett ord jag inte riktigt gillar. Det är något större än stil: det handlar om klarhet. Att sätta ihop meningar så att det lyser upp vad man vill säga. Det är många som beundrar Baldwin, men få försöker åstadkomma just det. Folk underskattar betydelsen av att skriva vackert. I akademin fnyser man åt det. Det finns en misstro mot att skriva vackert, som om man försökte gömma något.
Winners Take All doesn’t name it, but what it’s really describing is an institutional crisis in which the political landscape has been cleared of its forces for representation and reformation. Instead, power has been put in the hands of a group that believes trade unions are merely cartels, thinkers are far inferior to “thought leaders” and hell is other people voting.
The Guardian, “Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas review – superb hate-reading“, 14 februari 2019