A suitable summer holiday pastime: reading Macaulay's essays - that English rings and echoes, robust and clear, majestic. And not just an estethetic joy but intellectual whether you agree with all those often rash, often mistaken judgements and encapsulations. But with many of them you actually do agree. Obviously a man of his time which was racist, eurocentric, imperialist, and so he. But there is another note there, of trust in progress and enlightenmentm, in honest intellectual enquiry, a note of confidence in liberalism however narrow whig kind of variety. There is something very inviting in that attitude, in that confidence. The defects are temporal, the strengths for all time. We lack that confidence and that honesty now and have lacked for a long time. Has that been for the better?
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