This book has been almost unanimously praised, sometimes quite dizzily, though I am not sure if I fully understand why. Zeldin is, it seems, a respected historian, but this is not really a historian's book. It mixes together history in the broadest sense with a rather subjective, even eccentric melange of contemporary case histories, sound but, predictable liberal humanist sentiments in a rather homiletic vein, occasional passages of sane, shrewd socio political analysis, historical insights, and courageous generalisations. The result is always interesting, sometimes absorbing, but curiously heterogeneous, and reads more like the text of a sustained, idiosyncratic, personalised lecture than a coherent intellectual argument.