Last April I posted on this theme
Readers are aware of the rather eccentric stress this blog puts on the importance of
books having annotated bibliographies. Last year Penguin published
Why Politics Fails – the 5 traps of the modern world and how to escape them
Ben Ansell (2023) which ends with a rare essay which covers, for each chapter, the key books the author has found essential as themes for the lens through which he examines
democracy, equality, solidarity, security and prosperity. The only other book I’ve come across with such an essay is Peter Gay’s 680 page
magnum opus Modernism – the lure of heresy (2007) which has a stunning 32 page
bibliographical essay which, he warned, was “highly selective”! Peter Gay was born in Germany in 1923 but his family came to the States via Havana
in 1941 where he became a prolific US historian – as is evident from this Wikipedia entry.
One of his books is My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998), a powerful
and insightful account of his teenage years in Berlin.
Another which also has an extensive bib essay is Freud – a Life for our Times (1988)
whose bib essay extends to 76 pages. The book does, after all, have 1350 pages!
For me, such bibliographical essays are rare gems which offer an opportunity to understand an author’s preferences. Yesterday I came across another book with a great bibliographical essay -
Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven published in 1991. It’s essay is only 50 pages long!
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