I started being nostalgic for the Nineties before the Nineties were even over. From the vantage point of today, peace and prosperity look sweeter than ever, and would be fun to see again, even in a wistful rear-view mirror. These are the expectations with which I opened William L. O’Neill’s new history of the period, A Bubble in Time: America in the Interwar Years, 1989-2001, which landed on my desk today.

Ahem. Just a few pages in, we get this: “The Senate should have voted [Clarence] Thomas down because of his weak credentials, because of his evasiveness . . . His demagogic performance in the final hearings proved his unfitness for any court, let alone the highest.” Hey, O’Neill’s entitled to his opinion. What really gets me is his subsequent attempt to be fair: “Those who supported Justice Thomas can fairly claim that he has not been a disaster on the bench. His record to date is as mediocre as one would expect from someone who was never much more than a Republican placeholder. He is reliably on the conservative side of every question brought before the Court, Justice Antonin Scalia supplying the brains and Thomas an additional vote.”

Would it have killed O’Neill to actually read some of Thomas’s opinions? Could he have possibly written these sentences, if he had done so?