Modern times

What Hacker News says

1. mdp2021Jan 2023
   Sadly, historian Paul Johnson died in the past hours.

   His history of the XX Century, Modern times, and his biographies - among which are Intellectuals (1988), Creators (2006), Heroes (2007), Humorists (2010) - are some of the books one can warmly recommend.

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2. jbogganJul 2017
   "Modern Times" and "The Birth of the Modern" by Paul Johnson which cover world history from 1919-1989 and 1815-1830 respectively. Amazing histories written in a breadth and exploratory depth that illuminate so much of the past and make the present more understandable.
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3. hgaOct 2013
   Anyone who finds the concept potentially appealing really needs to read up on pre-WWII Japanese politics, where a culture of political assassination, plus a major flaw in their constitutions, couldn't form a government without the Army and Navy's assent/membership, pretty much made the following ugliness inevitable. You really, really don't want to let such a culture develop.

   Paul Johnson's Modern Times devotes a chapter to this: http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Edition-Perennial...

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4. mdp2021Mar 2025
   > historically "a good pair of shoes" was always something people appreciated throughout all times and cultures

   (It seems I am indulging in anecdotes a bit in this page, but anyway) In the portrait of "Lenin" Ulyanov by Paul Johnson in Modern Times, you will read

   > Lenin left Zurich to return to Russia on 8 April 1917. [...] At Stockholm, comrade Karl Radek bought him a pair of shoes, but he refused other clothes, remarking sourly, ‘I am not going to Russia to open a tailor’s shop’.

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5. mdp2021Sep 2021
   In the de-constructive palingenetic perspective some see in its human promoters:

   > And had not «mere anarchy», as W.B. Yeats put it in 1916, been «loosed upon the world»? To many, the war had seemed the greatest calamity since the fall of Rome. Germany, from fear and ambition, and Austria, from resignation and despair, had willed the war in a way the other belligerents had not. It marked the culmination of the wave of pessimism in German philosophy which was its salient characteristic in the pre-war period. Germanic pessimism, which contrasted sharply with the optimism based upon political change and reform to be found in the United States, Britain, France and even Russia in the decade before 1914, was not the property of the intelligentsia but was to be found at every level of German society, particularly at the top. In the weeks before the outbreak of Armageddon, Bethmann Hollweg's secretary and confident Kurt Riezler made notes of the gloomy relish with which his master steered Germany and Europe into the abyss. July 7 1914: «The Chancellor expects that a war, whatever its outcome, will result in the uprooting of everything that exists. The existing world very antiquated, without ideas». July 27: «Doom greater than human power hanging over Europe and our own people». Bethmann Hollweg had been born in the same year as Freud, and it was as though he personified the "death instinct" the latter coined as the fearful decade ended. Like most educated Germans, he had read Max Nordau's Degeneration, published in 1895, and was familiar with the degenerative theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. War or no war, man was in inevitable decline; civilization was heading for destruction. Such ideas were commonplace in central Europe, preparing the way for the gasp of approbation which greeted Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, fortuitously timed for publication in 1918 when the predicted suicide had been accomplished.

   Paul Johnson, Modern Times.

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