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Past Imperfect

2009-09-01 Fiction
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Release : 2009-09-01
Genre : Fiction
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 170/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Past Imperfect by : Julian Fellowes

Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Julian Fellowes. This book was released on 2009-09-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of the Emmy Award-winning Downton Abbey... "Damian Baxter was a friend of mine at Cambridge. We met around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while...." Nearly forty years later, the narrator hates Damian Baxter and would gladly forget their disastrous last encounter. But if it is pleasant to hear from an old friend, it is more interesting to hear from an old enemy, and so he accepts an invitation from the rich and dying Damian, who begs him to track down the past girlfriend whose anonymous letter claimed he had fathered a child during that ruinous debutante season. The search takes the narrator back to the extraordinary world of swinging London, where aristocratic parents schemed to find suitable matches for their daughters while someone was putting hash in the brownies at a ball at Madame Tussaud's. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing—and it was, but not always quite as expected. Past Imperfect is Julian Fellowes at his best--a novel of secrets, status, and a world in upheaval.

Past Imperfect

1996-11-15 History
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Release : 1996-11-15
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 609/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Past Imperfect by : Mark C. Carnes

Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Mark C. Carnes. This book was released on 1996-11-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays that consider how classic movies have reflected history include the writings of such noted historians as Paul Fussell, Antonia Fraser, and Gore Vidal.

Past Imperfect

1992 History
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Release : 1992
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 500/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Past Imperfect by : Tony Judt

Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Tony Judt. This book was released on 1992. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The uniquely prominent role of French intellectuals in European cultural and political life following World War II is the focus of Tony Judt's newest book. He analyzes this intellectual community's most divisive conflicts: how to respond to the promise and the betrayal of Communism and how to sustain a commitment to radical ideals when confronting the hypocrisy in Stalin's Soviet Union, in the new Eastern European Communist states, and in France itself. Judt shows why this was an all-consuming moral dilemma to a generation of French men and women, how their responses were conditioned by war and occupation, and how post-war political choices have come to sit uneasily on the conscience of later generations of French intellectuals. Judt's analysis extends beyond the writings of fashionable "Existentialist" personalities such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir to include a wide intellectual community of Catholic philosophers, non-aligned journalists, literary critics and poets, Communist and non-Communist alike. Judt treats the intellectual dilemmas of the postwar years as an unfinished history. French intellectuals have not fully come to terms with the gnawing sense of what Judt calls the "moral irresponsibility" of those years. The result, he suggests, is a legacy of bad faith and confusion that has damaged France's cultural standing, notably in newly liberated Eastern Europe, and which reflects the nation's larger difficulty in confronting its own ambivalent past.

Past Imperfect

2011 History
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Release : 2011
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 927/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Past Imperfect by : Tony Judt

Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Tony Judt. This book was released on 2011. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Swept up in the vortex of communism, French postwar intellectuals developed a blind spot to Stalinist tyranny. Albert Camus, who had been an authentic moral voice of the Resistance, pretended not to know about the crimes and terrors of the Soviet Union. Jean-Paul Sartre perverted logic to make an apologia for the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Simone de Beauvoir called for social change to be brought about in a single convulsion, or else not at all. Foolish French thinkers, suffering self-imposed moral anesthesia, defended the credibility of the show trials in Stalinized Eastern Europe. In a devastating study, Judt, a professor of European studies at New York University, argues that the belief system of postwar intellectuals, propped up by faith in communism, reflected fatal weaknesses in French culture such as the fragility of the liberal tradition and the penchant for grand theory. He also strips away the postwar myth that the small, fighting French Resistance was assisted by the mass of the nation.

Past Imperfect

2007-07-03 History
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Release : 2007-07-03
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 946/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Past Imperfect by : Peter Charles Hoffer

Download or read book Past Imperfect written by Peter Charles Hoffer. This book was released on 2007-07-03. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Woodrow Wilson, a practicing academic historian before he took to politics, defined the importance of history: "A nation which does not know what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today." He, like many men of his generation, wanted to impose a version of America's founding identity: it was a land of the free and a home of the brave. But not the braves. Or the slaves. Or the disenfranchised women. So the history of Wilson's generation omitted a significant proportion of the population in favor of a perspective that was predominantly white, male and Protestant. That flaw would become a fissure and eventually a schism. A new history arose which, written in part by radicals and liberals, had little use for the noble and the heroic, and that rankled many who wanted a celebratory rather than a critical history. To this combustible mixture of elements was added the flame of public debate. History in the 1990s was a minefield of competing passions, political views and prejudices. It was dangerous ground, and, at the end of the decade, four of the nation's most respected and popular historians were almost destroyed by it: Michael Bellesiles, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose and Joseph Ellis. This is their story, set against the wider narrative of the writing of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times." To which he could have added: falsify, plagiarize and politicize, because that's the other story of America's history.

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