and what they did, to examine their illusions about themselves and the process that led them to accept these illusions as truths. ‘To avoid repeating the received ideas about the past, I have burrowed into as many aspects of life as possible, that erudition has not hitherto explored.’ Thirdly, the book contains innumerable intimate ‘portraits in prose’ of individuals from every social group, emphasising the private life behind the public persona, and the unpublicised motivations concealed in ideas and ambitions, as though scrutinising humanity at the atomic level and finding every atom different, every character unique and many-sided, composed of a mass of smaller particles. The old generalisations about classes and parties melt away. Zeldin is the historian of human complexity, of the unpredictability of human interaction, and of the battles waging between muddled feelings inside every self, every family, every workplace. He diverts attention away from legalistic regulations to the cunning subterfuges people use to bend or avoid them, and he does so with a humour which is most often gentle but sometimes ferocious. Some readers were troubled, or even angered, by the book's challenge to so many deeply held convictions and by its unconventional construction, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated passions and showing unsuspected resonances between them, in preference to links of cause and effect or chronological narrative. Some deplored that he was defying the duty of a historian to provide all-embracing explanations of the events of the past. Some did not appreciate his downplaying the influence of political and ideological divisions on daily life. Others complained that he gave prominence to subjects different from those studied in history classes at school or university and so would not help students to pass their examinations. Zeldin's picture of reality is indeed deliberately fragmented, with clashing sensitivities fomenting uncontrollable turbulence; he scavenges through the debris of disagreement and difference so as to view life from multiple perspectives. The explanation, said one reviewer, was that Zeldin combined ‘the interests of the novelist with the techniques of the historian… He is a modern Balzac, but one capable of supporting his assertions with statistics.’ ‘He is our new La Bruyère’, said another, because of the prominence he gave to character and temperament and the absurdities they generate. The book ‘reads like a novel’, said a third, with a ‘succession of dazzling portraits, of surprising revelations, and of analyses which fascinate and disturb at the same