It is idiocy to be sentimental about the past, but one largely departed and valuable feature of the childhood of earlier generations was the role of books in our lives.
All middle-class children had at least one children's encyclopaedia, or sets of encyclopaedia: every household had Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia and H.G. Wells's The Outline of History. Whenever the weather was poor, in the days before daytime television, children found refuge in reading.
By the time we had reached adolescence, most of us had grasped a rough narrative of the history of the world, from ancient Greece, to Columbus, to the industrial revolution, the age of empires, and the world wars of the 20th century. We didn't even think of what we knew as knowledge, any more than knowing the way to school was "knowledge"; it was part of what we were.
I suspect that is no longer the case: that although computers and the net have opened vast new worlds of information for children, they have not created a simple historical narrative for them. No doubt this is one reason why Yale has republished E. H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World, which, though it has appeared in 18 languages, had never until now never been translated into English.
In his lifetime, Gombrich personally embodied two distinct intellectual traditions. The first was very much that of the Viennese Jew of Mittel-Europa; this was the man who wrote A Little History over just six weeks in 1936 when he was just 26. The Nazis later repressed the book, and it vanished, almost without trace, for over 40 years; and then, in a move which should give heart to all authors of forgotten works, it was rediscovered by a German publisher, who reprinted it - with enormous success. By this time, Gombrich was a citizen of the Anglophone world which was to inherit the mantle of cultural tolerance and curiosity which had defined Mittel-Europa, and which the twin abominations of Nazism and Communism had destroyed.
Bizarrely, Gombrich's new nationality was one reason why A Little History did not appear in English, though it was published in a dozen and half languages. Gombrich insisted that if there was to be an English-language edition, he would have to be responsible for it - yet he found it difficult to reconcile English history with the very Eurocentric themes of A Little History. Indeed, like almost everyone of his background, he believed - even to the end - that the Enlightenment was the source of European freedom.
It was not. It was the source of some freedoms - but it was also the source of the lunacies of totalitarianism. Real freedom, in the sense which the world now understands it, was a gradual growth within the English parliamentary system, which took its fullest form in the USA. It is no coincidence that the Eurasian landmass, which in 1942 was - with the exception of the Indian sub-continent - controlled entirely by perverted, totalitarian descendants of the Enlightenment, within 50 years was liberated by the offshore Anglophone communities which surrounded it.
No, E. H. Gombrich does not make that point - for he remained an intellectual citizen of Mittel-Europa to the end of his days - and he remained wedded to the standard mainland belief that modern western civilisation grew out of the Enlightenment. And in all truth, my reservations about the true significance of the Enlightenment are neither here nor there, for it is easy to see why Gombrich's book has swept the world.
It is a joy to read, not merely because of his effortless mastery of global history, but also because he clearly was an enchanting man.
His style was amiable without being patronising - a quality which children can detect like a sniffer dog uncovering a kilo of uncut cocaine in a convent.
One subject which Gombrich had intended to write more about, but died at the age of 92 before he did so, was the English civil war. By happy chance, his publisher, Yale, has produced a splendid new history of that melancholy affair, Mark Stoyle's Soldiers and Strangers. It is a perfectly terrible tale, providing some of the defining, and thoroughly contradictory episodes in the incremental growth of both Anglophone freedom and murderous English Hibernophobia.
For example, 150 Irish soldiers bound for service with their lawful monarch, King Charles, were captured at sea by parliamentarians. Their English captors later celebrated St George's Day, April 23rd, 1645, by joyfully killing them all at Pembroke. Such murders of Irish prisoners by Roundheads became regular occurrences, and were endorsed by an ordinance in Parliament, which ordered its soldiers not to "give quarter to any Irishman, or papist born in Ireland". After the battle of Naseby, parliamentary troops hacked to death at least 100 women camp-followers in the apparent belief they were Irish, though they were probably Welsh whose language was mistaken for Irish. This massacre was widely celebrated by parliamentarians.
The great paradox to modern sensibilities is that while English republicans loathed the Irish with a truly racist venom, the royalist leaders often loved them.
Prince Rupert regarded his Irish soldiers with particular affection - so much so that he hanged 13 captured Roundheads in revenge for the murder of 13 captured Irishmen by parliamentary troops.
And what truly appalled the parliamentarians was not so much the revenge murders of their men, but the incredible royalist notion that one Irish life was actually deemed equal to one English life.
Yet out of this bloodied, fetid sewer, amazingly, sprang the improbable shoot of freedom that would one day flower as parliamentary democracy.