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If your thoughts are running to decline and fall— though I can't imagine why on earth they should be—you might want to hunker down with Adrian Goldsworthy's How Rome Fell, just published by Yale University Press. One of Goldsworthy's great virtues is common sense, bracingly put to work. He begins with a superb overview of the "state of the art," touching not only on currents in scholarship but also on Rome in the popular imagination. A while back, I planned a special section on Rome in Books & Culture (including a couple of then-new books on the fall of Rome), but I could never get it off the ground. Maybe I should try again.
We've seen on other occasions how books that have followed very different trajectories to publication seem designed to be read together. A number of the most interesting people I've met in the years since 1996 (I think it was), when I first attended a Liberty Fund gathering, have been participants in these meetings, which (with a nod to Michael Oakeshott, but especially to the founder of Liberty Fund, Pierre Goodrich) celebrate conversation for its own sake. (I know, I know. At first I thought there was a trick of some sort, a hidden agenda. Nope.) So it was that I met Paul Rahe several years ago. Yale has just published Rahe's longawaited book, Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, and will issue a companion volume (on Montesquieu) in the fall. This is a project of staggering erudition, driven by great passion. I've only begun to plumb it, and to read this book and the second volume properly will require a long time not only with Rahe's own words but also with his conversation partners. Even on a first pass, though, it's clear that Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift and How Rome Fell should be in the same stack at your bedside.
What else might find a home in that stack? Oxford's Bodleian Library has been doing a splendid series of little books collecting postcards on various themes. The two latest volumes (distributed in the United States by the University of Chicago Press) are Postcards of Political Icons and Postcards from Checkpoint Charlie. The latter collection is particularly rich, bizarre, and haunting. One of the last cards hails the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Decline and fall can be good news. (Warning: these aren't detachable postcards.)
Mention of Checkpoint Charlie reminds me that Len Deighton celebrated his 80th birthday in February of this year. That happy occasion was accompanied by an announcement from HarperCollins, saying that a number of Deighton's books (including, of course, The IPCRESS File and Funeral in Berlin) will be reissued in the UK, beginning in June of this year. I have been trying to find out when the books will start showing up over here, without any response so far. I've also pitched a Deighton retrospective to a couple of editors, both of whom, alas, said nyet. If you take as your pool novelists who began publishing around 1960—not just those writing spy fiction, such as John le Carré, whose first novel appeared in 1961, the year before Deighton's debut, but novelists across the board—Deighton is among those I find most consistently re - readable, and the arc of his work is fascinating. "Critical esteem" doesn't matter all that much in the end, I suppose, but he's a wonderful writer, and I want to do my bit to get the word out.
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