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I'm really sorry, but I'm pretty sure it's not true - Gardner Dozois started the book in the seventies but couldn't get past the first section. Martin built most of the structure in the eighties, but couldn't find an ending. Then in the 2000s he dug it out of a drawer and gave it to his...

An excellent summary. I could have made the point that some of these figures are actually rather Edwardian - Belloc, Chesterton, and Churchill were very much pre-war figures in much of their outlook, and that surely shapes their writing here. Another dreadful thought: this book in some way...

A belated correction: Evans was quoting Carr. Evans is sceptical of counterfactuals, rightly, but he actually put out perhaps the best academic volume on alternate history, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History which I should review for the blog sometime.

Indeed. Arguably another ancestor of this field is the old British army essay, 'The Defence of Duffer's Drift' which is essentially Groundhog Day: South Africa, with a hapless subaltern getting his position overrun in new and painful ways every day until he works out the right sequence of orders...

I think the distinction is between 'counterfactuals are a parlour game,' and the implied' counterfactuals are nothing but a parlour game.' An important historiographical note is that the Carr quotation comes from his book 'What is History' which is basically a series of historiographical...

There's a fairly intense debate about the extent to which the British public was actually all that interested in the Empire outside of moments of great fervour such as the death of Gordon. I do think it's a curious lacuna in that this was a post-war book that was published at a time when there...

I feel like SLP should adopt it. Liam Connell (Third Place Year Six Free-Style, Winner Year 13 Speech Competition)

I do recommend this book for anyone who's interested in the history of this genre. Once you get past the ludicrously posh authors, it really is very interesting to see just how similar the work is to much of the stuff being done here on ah.com.

@monroe Sorry, that sounded sharper than I meant. I agree- Camus is a big figure. Hmm... Vignette idea: Orwell and Camus both survive, we play with a stronger anti-Soviet left in Europe that's tainted by.... er, erratic.... takes on decolonisation.

Read the entire post.

I dunno, I don't think there's anything inherently interesting in the continued life of Camus, it would come down entirely into what meaning we actively chose to assign to it.

Great interview with an interesting writer. Good work David.

I'm not a Brit, but I like to think I've picked up a decent understanding of a certain sort of middle-class Englishness.

The Rest is Wish Fulfillment Iskander considered the mortal carefully. It was, the great djinn thought, familiar with the ways of wishers. Since he had first been bound in the time of Babylon, since he had first been borne from the winds of fire to the squalor of this plane, their whims were...

This is brilliant.

There's a lot of stuff that looks interesting here, but it moves very fast- for example, what actually prompts the General Assembly to pass reforms?

What a delightful little thought experiment.

I'm torn- on the one hand, I don't want to have too many options because I think that will quickly become its own sort of toxic social signalling. On the other hand, as @ShortsBelfast says it does feel odd to 'like' a post because it's got an informative position on an atrocity. My preferred...

Just to be clear, you're suggesting that it's not that the media exaggerated the antisemitism scandals, you're saying that the media chose to run an 'antisemitism campaign' and would have done so anyway, regardless of the actual candidate? That does seem to be what you're saying.

What a delightful idea. And good picks too.