Books, Arts & Manners: Horizons of Freedom

The New History and the Old, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Belknap/Harvard, 209 pp., $20)

Some of us over fifty can recall those elegant Central European ladies of a certain age. Their manner was urbane and in keeping with their beautiful clothes. They spoke three or four languages flawlessly, but alas! they were unable to do anything more than pass the time of day or engage in the most inconsequential gossip in any of them. Gertrude Himmelfarb tells us in The New History and the Old that Clio, the muse of history, is on the point of becoming one of these Central European ladies of a certain age: urbane and elegant, but wholly devoid of meaningful conversation. History’s conversation has been trivialized with ideological and sociological clichés.

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Stephen J. Tonsor

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The New History and the Old, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Belknap/Harvard, 209 pp., $20)

Some of us over fifty can recall those elegant Central European ladies of a certain age. Their manner was urbane and in keeping with their beautiful clothes. They spoke three or four languages flawlessly, but alas! they were unable to do anything more than pass the time of day or engage in the most inconsequential gossip in any of them. Gertrude Himmelfarb tells us in The New History and the Old that Clio, the muse of history, is on the point of becoming one of these Central European ladies of a certain age: urbane and elegant, but wholly devoid of meaningful conversation. History’s conversation has been trivialized with ideological and sociological clichés.