Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

A rediscovered common childhood, a renewal of contact in old age, dramatize the image of our times: absurd, ironic, surrealist and monstrous. They do not create them.

not world history illustrated by the experiences of an individual, but world history shaping that experience, or rather offering a shifting but always limited set of choices from which, to adapt Karl Marx’s phrase, ‘men make [their lives], but they do not make [them] just as they please, they do not make [them] under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ and, one might add, by the world around them

In any case, however curious we are about these matters, historians are not gossip columnists. The military merits of generals are not to be judged by what they do, or fail to do, in bed. All attempts to derive Keynes’s or Schumpeter’s economics from their rather full but different sex lives are doomed. Besides, I suspect that readers with a taste for biographies that lift bedclothes would find my own life disappointing.