"An Intimate History of Humanity"

[fiefoe]

Theodore Zeldin acknowledges his own French tendencies: 'What I value particularly is the tradition of thinking about its own problems in universal terms'. Human history is organized here not by time or place, but by themes like freedom and love. A fascinating landscape thus opens before us, strange and familiar all at once.

Some of the main theses:

• Our imaginations are inhabited by ghosts.
• The mind is a refuge for ideas dating from many different centuries, just as the cells of the body are of different ages, renewing themselves or decaying at varying speeds.
• The consumer society is a giant tranquilliser for raw nerves.
  
•  It is important to remember that it is tiring, and trying, being free; and in times of exhaustion affection for freedom has always waned, whatever lip-service might be paid to it.
• The noise of the world is made out of silences.
• The world's memories are normally stored in such a way that it is not easy to use them.
• To place the dilemmas of the present in a perspective which is not dominated by the idea of perpetual conflict.
• To find a new sense of direction, it will need to incorporate the certainty of failure, to a lesser or greater extent; but if failure is expected, and studied, it need not destroy courage.
• the old, deeply ingrained dislike of being interrupted, which seemed a sort of mutilation.

__ 'The height of misery is to depend on another's will'... and yet the fantasies of romantic love are based on dependence.
__ 'Whereas a woman lives each stage of her life, she has several lives. Men refuse to.'
__ '... we use someone else's help to stay alive - the only things we keep for ourselves are our pleasures,' wrote Pliny the Elder in AD 77.