The Cold War was both an era of armed peace and global violence. The United States and the Soviet Bloc may have avoided the nuclear annihilation that many feared, but the rest of the world saw little peace between 1946 and 1989. The chilling concept of Mutual Assured Destruction added a sinister novelty to what was, in essence, a simple continuation of the geopolitics of imperial rivalry that have been a hallmark of the modern age. Europe was divided, but not in ruins; the actual wars of the Cold War were fought in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, as the United States and the USSR shot at each other by proxy.

In retrospect, the long duration of the Cold War was perhaps not a surprise; but its quick end, when the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union fell with a sudden whoosh, caught many off guard. Grey, dreary, and oppressive, the Soviets nonetheless showed indomitable staying power over the years, crushing dissent when they had to -- in Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968 -- and alternately threatening and courting the West. Though the "war" ended two decades ago, it continues to define our sense of the latter half of the 20th century, and its ideas and stances have not yet ceased to influence the outlook of its former participants. The divisions within the West over the battle against communism remain stark, and the big questions -- What accounted for the Soviet downfall? How did the West prevail? -- are still a matter for fierce argument among the ageing Cold warriors still with us.

The intensity of these long-distant debates is more than apparent in the maddeningly idiosyncratic new book by the British historian Norman Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies. As a disinterested general overview of the Cold War, Stone's book is of dubious value. His account is, as the subtitle explains, "a personal history". The former Oxford professor of modern history and now director of the Russian-Turkish Center at the University of Bilkent, Turkey, Stone is a legendarily colourful character. (At Oxford, he conducted tutorials over billiards and glasses of Scotch). Vehemently opinionated and mordantly witty, Stone's personality barrels across the Atlantic at hurricane force.

His history lessons come with plenty of ad-hominem thunderbolts: John F Kennedy was "a hairdresser's Harvard man"; "[Jimmy] Carter's regime symbolised the era. It was desperately well-meaning. It jogged; it held hands everywhere it went with its scrawny wife"; "Nancy Reagan was a face lift too far," and so on.

However, such quips distract from the seriousness of Stone's often trenchant analysis. Stone, who is fluent in Hungarian, Polish, Czech and German among other tongues, is well-equipped to report from the trenches of this global struggle. He is a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher (who emerges, unsurprisingly, as the great heroine of this tale), but he is no end-of-history triumphalist. He says Marxism had much to recommend for analysing peasant economies of the postcolonial third world; he just vigorously disagrees with the prescriptions. Though he salutes "the extraordinary vigour of the capitalist world", one of his themes is how the Western alliance tended to fumble economic issues. For a time, it was the Soviet Union and Communism that seemed to have the answers.

In the immediate years after the Second World War, the British Empire, exhausted and financially prostrate, surrendered its place as a global power, creating an imperial vacuum into which the United States and the Soviet Union quickly moved -- leading Stone to dub the whole mess "the war of the British succession". The Allies had little claim on checking Stalin, whose armies had suffered immensely in the brutal struggle for the Eastern Front. He would have a sphere of influence in Europe, and his Communist allies in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia took power, however ruthlessly. In Asia, Mao triumphed in China and Ho Chi Minh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu. The US contested these advances, in Europe with defence guarantees and monies in the form of the Marshall Plan, and in East Asia with armed interventions on the Korean peninsula and Vietnam. Britain's last stab at imperial assertion, meanwhile, was the utter disaster at Suez in 1956.

But in Stone's telling, it is economics, not armaments and military manoeuvres, that take pride of place. His vignettes on the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis have the feel of a school primer. But on the economic issues confronting the West, Stone mounts a bold, if not altogether persuasive, argument. For Stone, the spectre haunting the West was not communism, but Keynsianism. America and Europe boomed through the 1950s and 1960s. In Western Europe, it seemed, social democracy could deliver the goods, literally: France had refrigerators and West Germany, washing machines. "Nato developed its own financial military complex," he writes, "and the central banks were part of it."

Still, financial arrangements in the Atlantic world were ever precarious. The dollar -- and its crucial adjunct, cheap oil -- underpinned the whole system, but by the end of the 1960s, this hard-won stability was starting to break apart. The United States, pouring money into the war in Vietnam and into LBJ's Great Society programmes, unleashed waves of inflationary pressures that, combined with oil shocks of the 1970s, would bring about a sea change for the Western economies. Inflation was the genie unleashed from the bottle, and getting it back in would vex governments across the Atlantic world.

Reviewing the decade, Stone finds little good to say about this turn in the West. It had become "extraordinarily self-indulgent". He approves of the coup in Chile that brought Augusto Pinochet to power (with not a little bloodshed) and the economic reforms the General put into place after seizing the presidency.

He commends Helmut Schmidt's gestures to the USSR and East Germany -- the so-called "Ostpolitik" -- and generally rhapsodises about the performance of the German economy, but for Britain his scorn is unrelenting. "Since 1815 Germans had been asking why they were not English. After 1950, the question should have been the other way about: why was it preferable to be German?" America's central partner in the Atlantic alliance was in thrall to the unions -- Stone hates them -- and spent money ontoo generous a welfare state: "The overall Atlantic crisis was displayed at its worst in England." (He refers to nationalised industries as "a sort of non-violent protection racket.") Stone spends a great deal of time in trade ministries looking at currency flows and trade imbalances, but here misses an opportunity to look at the broader intellectual contest about economics and society.

Stone does not have much to say about the social history of these decades, or the ideas that animated it. He is scathing about the student movement of the 1960s -- the expansion of universities, he suggests, was a mistake -- but he pays very little attention to debates that played out in magazines, journals and op-ed pages. If the Cold War was, in fact, a kind of intramural argument within the West about how best to organise society and politics -- whose roots date back to the same Enlightenment -- Stone acknowledges it only incidentally, by focusing so relentlessly on the disputes within the capitalist bloc. Thatcher's heroism, in his account, has less to do with her opposition to communism than her defeat of the moderate Tory "wets" and the unions inside Britain.

His disjointed narrative attains a certain momentum only with the arrival of the Iron Lady, "who knew when to be Circe and when to be the nanny from hell". Stone is a partisan, and he cheerleads for the supply-side economics favoured by the prime minister and her American partner Ronald Reagan; he approvingly cites Reagan's quip about the US government, "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidise it." This, in a nutshell, is what strikes Stone as wrong with the welfare state economics of the West.

Stone's account ends rather abruptly, with a whimper, not a bang. He hazards no thoughts about the legacies of the Cold War, its metaphysics and the habits of mind it spawned, and their implications for Europe and the rest of the world. For Stone, it is enough to say that the 1980s "had been the most interesting, by far, of the post-war decades". A united Europe, the crisis in Greece notwithstanding, is a successful by-product of the Cold War's end; yet the legacy of the Cold War is still, in some senses only coming into shape.

On the calendar of modern revolution, three great dates are marked: 1776, 1789, and 1917. From these three revolutions -- American, French and Russian -- the shape of the modern world seemed to have been formed; each proclaimed a new vision of state and society, made a radical break with the past, and claimed to stand at the forefront of history. America's founders established a republic and tested the viability of democracy; France's revolutionaries beheaded a king and promoted the rights of man, unleashing a revolutionary cycle that transformed Europe; Russian Bolsheviks proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat and the end of capitalism.

The English Revolution of 1688, which saw the Catholic James II overthrown by his son-in-law, the Dutch Protestant William of Orange, would seem to have no place in this datebook of social upheaval. This "revolution" founded no new state; it did not resound with slogans like Liberte, égalité, fraternité; and it certainly ran with less blood than did the streets of Leningrad. England's Glorious Revolution simply saw the swap of one king for another -- hardly an unusual transaction in 17th century Europe.

This is not to say that King James II failed to provoke the discontent of his subjects: he was a heavy-handed ruler who placed Catholic allies in important posts, ran roughshod over Parliament and deployed a standing army across England, forcing his subjects to board them in pubs and inns. But whether his overthrow was worthy of the word "revolution" remains a matter of some debate. It has been described as a provincial happening, a back-room deal hashed out between aristocrats, a mild constitutional kerfuffle with a pleasantly bloodless resolution.

Edmund Burke -- who in his Reflections on the Revolution in France contrasted the sweet reasonableness of 1688 with the violent chaos of 1789 -- helped establish the template by which the Glorious Revolution would be judged: a peaceable affair, even by English standards. Later historians buttressed Burke's contention that what really happened in 1688 was really no revolution at all. The locus classicus of a Glorious Unrevolution was put forth by Thomas Babington Macaulay: "To us who have lived in the year 1848," he wrote in his History of England, "it may seem almost an abuse of terms to call a proceeding, conducted with so much deliberation, with so much sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive etiquette, by the terrible name of revolution."

Yet this apparently uneventful transfer of power concealed profound alterations in the relationship between the English crown and its subjects, and set into motion the formation of a new kind of modern state, whose characteristics -- vigorous promotion of economic development, broad religious tolerance, and free competition among political interests -- still define liberal democracies today.

In his magisterial new book (for once, this overused adjective is warranted), the historian Steve Pincus takes aim at the traditional narrative of the Glorious Revolution, and sets out to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was more than worthy of the name: a revolution that was contentious, sometimes violent and even bloody, that pitted two radical factions against one another and transformed England.

1688: The First Modern Revolution is one of the most ambitious works of history to appear in recent years -- a radical reinterpretation of events that intends not merely to update and improve prior accounts but to vanquish them conclusively. The book is a marvel of scholarship: Pincus's footnotes bristle with references to a vast range of archival material alongside the latest research in European economic, religious and political history. His focus -- too much so at times -- is on how history is written, as much as on the events in question, and the result reads at times more like a dense work of political sociology than a narrative history in the mould of Macaulay. But Pincus, evidently obsessed with our need to rethink the events of 1688, has fired an invigorating shot into the otherwise docile realm of Stuart history. Though he too often abandons the subtlety of argument for the force of harangue, his deep learning, and his fearless questioning of received wisdom, more than redeem the book's flaws.

Pincus demonstrates that by the second half of the century, England was already a land in flux: commerce was booming, foreign trade was on the rise; the English were moving to cities, where coffeehouses buzzed with the latest intelligence from abroad. The country was modernising at a rapid clip, and the revolution, as Pincus describes it, was in essence a battle -- a fierce one -- over the terms of that modernisation. James II, who in the accounts of Macaulay and many other historians appears as nothing more than a mad Catholic tyrant, was in fact a forward-looking ruler with his own vision for England's future, one drawn from the absolutist rule of his cousin, France's Louis XIV. James, Pincus writes, "did everything he could to create a modern, rational, centralised Catholic state" -- and he was ruthless in its implementation, cracking down on dissent and spying on his enemies, in effect creating "a very modern surveillance state".

When James first took the throne in 1685, he had the widespread support of the English people. What eventually roused his enemies, Pincus argues, was not simple anti-Catholicism, but opposition to his aspirations for a "universal monarchy" along absolutist lines. The origins of the Glorious Revolution, in Pincus's account, lay in a broader European debate over the meaning of liberty. "The struggle that did so much to define the thinking of the revolutionaries in 1688-89," he writes, "was a struggle to protect European and English national liberties against an aspiring universal monarch, not a war of religion." Rather than a provincial tussle over monarchy and religion in England, this was a conflict with a secular and international dimension, a revolution whose central plank was liberty for mankind, not merely for the English.

Alongside the lofty banner of liberty -- or driving it forward -- was a concurrent struggle over the economic direction of England, whose results would prove even more definitive for the shape of the world to come. England's dynamic economy drove new political concerns into the open. "The political economic programme of the revolutionaries privileged urban and commercial values," Pincus writes, and gave rise to Lockean notions about the social contract, religious toleration, and a belief in the free circulation in information. James's opponents, as Pincus notes, came from a variety of backgrounds -- from peasants to aristocrats -- but it was the country's burgeoning commercial classes that played the strongest role in shaping the economic agenda after the revolution, pushing for "the possibilities of unlimited economic growth based on the creative potential of human labour." This was not a revolution against the state but one determined to harness state power in the pursuit of economic expansion. In place of the Gallic absolutism pursued by James, England's growing merchant classes and their political spokesmen turned their eyes to Holland and a "Dutch model" of economic innovation, commercial prosperity and political openness.

If what ensued in the Glorious Revolution was not quite an apocalyptic confrontation between world views, the clash of these rival programs was divisive and actually quite bloody. (In one skirmish between Williamite and royalist forces, more troops were killed than in the massacre of the Champs de Mars, one of the bloodiest episodes of the French Revolution). But that neglected violence is not what makes 1668 qualify as a "real" revolution in Pincus's mind. What justifies the term are the ramifications that unfolded in the decades to come, in which the Whigs and Tories jockeyed for position and contested the implications of the changes they had wrought, further reiterating one of the underlying principles of the revolution -- the free competition of political interests.

A recognisable outline of the modern liberal state took shape in the aftermath of 1688. England fashioned a kind of parliamentary monarchy, enshrining explicit checks on the line of royal descent (no more Catholic kings) and controls on royal income. The ground was also laid for England's rise as a commercial superpower, with the establishment of the Bank of England, which expanded credit for the growing mercantile classes and financed England's wars against France.

"The Revolution of 1688-89 was the culmination of a long and vitriolic argument about how to transform England into a modern nation," Pincus writes. He suggests that later generations took the achievements of the Glorious Revolution for granted. With the passage of time, it boomed less louder, and its effects were perhaps subtler. But the argument had hardly ended. The Glorious Revolution inaugurated a new phase in history, in which commerce supplanted landed wealth as the ultimate guarantor of economic success, and the "Dutch model" became the way of the world. Though the later revolutions in America and France would revise the terms of the liberal state -- the first toward democracy, the second toward equality -- the world made by 1688, as Pincus so adroitly demonstrates, is the one in which we still live today.

But the second coming of American realism struck out past the well-manicured lawns of tony Westchester and went down market, into Appalachia, the deep South, out West, and beyond. The movement, such as it was, earned the sobriquets "dirty realism" and "Kmart realism," and if there is any one writer associated with the style it is Raymond Carver, whose influential collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love have been credited with reviving the fortunes of the short form in the 1970s and '80s. Carver inspires an intense—at times disconcerting—piety in his admirers. For a decade after his major publications, it seemed almost every young writer wanted to be the next Carver (graduates of programs like the Iowa Writers' Workshop should probably fork over royalties to the Carver estate: His hardscrabble tales launched a thousand MFAs). However, even a cursory scan of his biography—the booze, the infidelities, the serial bankruptcies, and the death at the height of his fame—leaves one with a sense of desolation as strong as any evoked by his famously gloomy stories.

It is said that Carver enlisted his sufferings in the service of his craft. It's an almost comically noble sentiment, one that Carol Sklenicka questions little in her biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Her nearly six-hundred-page account buckles under a relentless accumulation of close-up detail; the biographer of this master of minimalism is a maximalist, ever ready with a histrionic flourish. (About his alcoholism, Sklenicka writes, "There was one problem he couldn't leave behind. The elephant in the room, the secret he couldn't face himself, grew bigger by the day.") She frames her narrative as a struggle between art and life, with her subject stranded in between.

Sklenicka provides a full record of Carver's childhood in Washington's Yakima Valley—he was the son of a lumber-mill worker—and his slow ascent as a writer. He had no connections to any literary establishment, and his long apprenticeship, when he worked a series of low-end jobs and contributed to tiny literary magazines, was nothing if not dogged. His career is inextricably linked to the rise of the writing workshop—as both a student and a teacher, Carver was in and out of writing programs—and the rise of the slickly marketed paperback original. (Along with Jay McInerney, Carver was one of the first authors featured in the Vintage Contemporaries series.) But some twenty years after his death, vexed issues about the way he was edited still bedevil Carver's reputation. Even so, the Library of America has gathered his two most famous volumes of short fiction, along with bits and pieces of memoirs, alternate versions of stories, and Beginners, the manuscript version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

What We Talk About, published in 1981, is undoubtedly Carver's most influential book. Despite the writer's blue-collar origins and the alleged verisimilitude of his characterizations—the fractured marriages, put-upon waitresses, and unemployed layabouts—his fiction lacks a certain particularity. If his stories are dotted with the place names of California and the Pacific Northwest (see, for example, the story "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"), there is not much that distinguishes him as a "western" writer; he was a pioneer of Anywheresville, USA. Carver lived for many years in Cupertino, a bland place that's not quite suburb, not quite city, so it's no surprise that his settings typically lack the social density and sense of locale that distinguish much traditional realism. This isn't a bad thing; writers aren't sociologists. But Carver's reputation as the laureate of the disenfranchised requires qualification; the class he explored wasn't social so much as it was psychological—the emotionally indigent.

About Carver's fiction, Irving Howe once mused, "It's a meager life that Mr. Carver portrays, without religion or politics or culture, without the shelter of class or ethnicity, without the support of strong folkways or conscious rebellion." Yet this observation perhaps missed the point. In the story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," Carver homes in on what the narrator calls "human noise." It's a potent phrase—hinting at something inhuman, that the things that come out of our mouths are less than words, a kind of detritus of the soul. Indeed, this savagely mordant four-character roundabout is a tour de force of boozy talk—two couples whose attempts to talk about love take them on what seem to be necessary detours through death, violence, and suicide. Not that Cheever lacked for drunken banter, but Carver was up to something different: You might call this realism, but it's pushing at something else altogether, toward a dizzying void.

Questions about Carver's intent continue to swirl around these iconic stories and around the role played by his editor, Gordon Lish, who considerably reshaped Beginners into the volume we know as What We Talk About. How one views this controversy depends in part on what you think of the author-editor relationship. As the celebrated fiction editor of Esquire in the early '70s, Lish got Carver into the glossies and later edited two collections. Playing the role of domineering enthusiast, the editor made the struggling author, who had a few prize-winning stories to his credit, into a name brand.

The partnership was hardly unprecedented. Radical edits are nothing new in American literature—Maxwell Perkins shaped the unruly manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald's insistence that Hemingway cut the entire first chapter of The Sun Also Rises was on the mark, and The Waste Land would be very different without Ezra Pound's blue pencil. Lish, too, was often the better craftsman. He coined startling turns of phrase and ably mimicked the jagged rhythms of speech—"human noise" is his, and Carver's "I began to feel sorry for him right away" became the memorable "My God, Rita, those were fingers" in "Fat." He cut characters' backstories and pared down some tales into short-shorts that actually gave birth to their own subgenre. He sharpened dialogue in angular ways that almost detached voices from their speakers, leaving readers adrift amid the verbal thrusts and parries. Indeed, the process, by which the editor excavated an intent latent in the author's prolix draft, might be dubbed Carver reading Lish reading Carver. As the notes and letters accompanying their exchanges attest, the exercise filled the writer with a mixture of horror and awe. He nearly stopped the presses on What We Talk About, but he ultimately signed off on publication—an important point to keep in mind during the present-day debate over his authorship.

Sklenicka's accounts of these episodes are surprisingly evenhanded. Lish is not the bad guy, nor is Carver the dupe. Carver was ambivalent, but he knew what Lish could do —to his editor, he wrote, "I want them to be the best possible stories, and I want them to be around for a while. . . . So open the throttle. Ramming speed." Lish needed no such invitation; he had been tweaking Carver's writing for years. What We Talk About is an amplification, albeit in extreme form, of something that began in 1976 with Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The Lish effect is there, but more subtly. If he took a scalpel to Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, he employed a machete on the manuscript of What We Talk About. Carver did publish alternate versions of certain stories, yet those versions do little to convince us that Lish was a malign influence. Take "The Bath," a story about a boy struck by a car on his birthday, which also appears in Cathedral (1983) and elsewhere as "A Small, Good Thing." The collaborative version ("The Bath") is menacing; much of its resolution is withheld by a perverse narrative cruelty. Does the boy live or die? For Lish, closure was for losers. In his conclusion, the parents get a call from the hospital—"'Scotty,' the voice said. 'It is about Scotty,' the voice said. 'It has to do with Scotty, yes'"—and that's all we know. It's the human noise again, buzzing in our ears.

The Lish-edited collections included in the Library of America edition are now canonical; at the time of their publication, they catapulted Carver to fame. But it was no deal with the devil, as Sklenicka concludes: "The success of What (orchestrated, for worse or better, by Lish) had unlocked doors for Carver. He was more than ready to walk through them." Carver did so, but his experience with Lish pricked at him. For Cathedral, he declared his independence—he would accept only minor edits from Lish, nothing more. These stories are careful, empathetic, and ultimately conventional. Not reputation makers, not fiction that brands a style. With his powerful instinct for etching heartache, Carver would have written worthy stories with or without his editor. Whether we would be reading that work in an edition designed for the ages is another question, one that's as unanswerable as it is provocative.

The sum of these fears — or their apotheosis — is the belief that civilisation (read: "the West") is fated to decline, to be subdued from without or collapse from within. This too, is not a new idea. History, it is true, has often been narrated as a Whiggish tale of continual progress — that "It's getting better all the time", as Sir Paul McCartney put it. But this uplifting Enlightenment sentiment has always been opposed by a darker view, one that stresses the cycles of history, the tendency for what has risen to fall again — a physics of decline with its own martial undertones, including the unmistakable implication that the West, fat and happy with the fruits of its technological and cultural sophistication, is blithely tottering on the brink of oblivion.

Few thinkers savaged Europe's faith in progress with the ferocity of Friedrich Nietzsche, who thought that anything called "progress" was a mere illusion — if there was even such a thing, he suggested, its flowering could only give way to dissolution. Nietzsche's ideas were carried into the 20th century by Oswald Spengler, whose book The Decline of the West became the ur-text of declinism in the 1920s. About history, Spengler concluded: "I see no progress, no goal no path for humanity."

Spengler's pessimism squared nicely with the gloomy mood of Europe after the First World War. If his book appears now as a curious artefact of its time, it helped to establish a template of decline — and a rhetoric to evoke its inevitability — that endures today, a kind of civilisational pessimism that exists at all points among the ideological spectrum; the declinists of the left and right obsess over very different threats, but the essential dynamic transcends politics.

In his suggestive new book The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, the distinguished historian Richard Overy looks back to the time of Spengler to explore how the paradox of progress and peril consumed almost every aspect of British society in the two decades between the First and Second World Wars. His subject matter, Overy writes, "is in no sense an insular history". As America does today, Britain then considered itself the hub of western civilisation — and its putative crisis was cast by intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians and scientists as a "crisis of civilisation", tout court. Fear and doubt, then as now, were pervasive — over the resilience of capitalism, the health of the population, the direction of society and, above all, about whether Europe would soon destroy itself in another violent conflagration. The discourse Overy surveys was widespread: "There were few areas of intellectual endeavour, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, that were not affected in some form or other by the prevailing paradigms of impending decline and collapse," he writes. "The sense of crisis was not specific to any one generation... nor was it confined to one political or social outlook."

Overy has gathered a rich harvest of material — pamphlets, broadsides, books, lectures, newsreels and radio broadcasts — from a diverse assortment of English writers and thinkers, among them EM Forster, the brothers Aldous and Julian Huxley, HG Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw and the historian Arnold Toynbee. If the world was indeed ending, there was as much eloquence from these figures as there was gloom about their predicament. (After a health crisis in 1936, Forster mused that he was being nursed "with so much kindness and sense," despite living in a "civilisation which has neither kindness or sense.")

Few did more to establish the tenor of the era than Arnold Toynbee, Britain's own Spengler. In Toynbee's view, all civilisations hewed to the same pattern, which Overy describes as "creative expansion, mechanistic consolidation, internal decay prompted by cultural stagnation, social division, and a final universal Caesarism". Just as past civilisations — Mayan, Roman, Greek — had seen glory and then disappeared from the face of the earth, the West would meet a similar fate. His ideas found a receptive audience in the inter-war years. Lecture halls featured talks on topics like "The Decay of Moral Culture" and the poetic if overwrought "The Smoke of Our Burning". Death was on everyone's minds — in 1924, one lecturer asked "Why not Commit Suicide?" (Overy does not say how the question was answered). In the mid-1930s, John Boulting (of the famed filmmaking duo the Boulting Brothers), recoiled after a trip to London, where he found only "dirt, disorder and a terrifying din", another sign of a society plunging "headlong, blindly and almost eagerly towards a gigantic carnival of self-extermination".

Today, this erudite hysteria may seem unintentionally funny, the hyper-articulate ravings of terrified intellectuals. But Overy notes that these views were hardly outside the mainstream: Britain had been overcome by a tidal wave of despair, and as the 1920s gave way to the years of the Slump, the agitation only increased. Writers fed the public's appetite for the literature of crisis — The Intelligent Man's Guide Through the World Chaos, by the socialist writer GDH Cole, sold some 50,000 copies in 1932. (Whatever the state of British civilisation, these years proved a boon to the publishers like Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, and Victor Gollancz, the proprietor of the Left Book Club.)

Overy contends that this was not merely a time of escalating and overheated rhetoric: the prophets of decline were deadly sincere, looking to science, economics, medicine and history to construct elaborate proofs of the nearing of the end. If, as has been suggested, this was primarily the discourse of an educated elite, whose views "reflected the prejudices and the expectations of the educated classes", the theories of decline found a wide and eager audience — they flourished, Overy writes, "in the first real age of mass communication".

The Morbid Age is a showcase for the brightest minds of the era, yet the fruits of all this fevered fretting were often less than palatable. The discourse of crisis was extreme in tone; the terms used to describe the state of Britain were invariably apocalyptic and millennial. Moderate voices were drowned by a series of emotive keywords that recur again and again in the literature Overy surveys: decay, menace, disease, barbarism, chaos, descent, sick. Even among some of the most progressive thinkers of the age, as Overy shows, the diagnosis that British civilisation was approaching collapse bore a deeply reactionary tint.

Perhaps the most sinister manifestation of this current was the intellectual vogue for eugenics. The rise and fall of civilisations could, in part, be explained by theories of racial purity. In Britain, many concluded that the wrong people — the poor and the mentally handicapped — were giving birth at a rate that threatened to engulf society in a wave of mediocrity. "We are getting larger and larger dregs at the bottom of our national vats," concluded one biologist. To counter the trend, the British Eugenics Society, whose members included Julian Huxley and Keynes, promoted a campaign of sterilisation that looked very much like a similar programme implemented in Nazi Germany.

This ugly esteem for eugenics was but one manifestation of the great faith laid at the feet of science, whose advances were widely believed to represent the only possible hope for salvation. "Confidence in the power of science to deliver what was appropriate for modern society was widespread" writes Overy. "In turn science enjoyed an exceptional power of suggestion among the widespread public, which followed the debates on issues of real contemporary significance closely."

But the sword of science cut two ways: for Toynbee, in fact, it was "scientific technique" that allowed him to verify the impending decline of the West, while others turned to the new protocols of psychoanalysis in an attempt to pinpoint society's weaknesses. If patients could be put on the couch, why not entire civilisations? Used properly, Freud's innovation might be used to cure "the insanity of nations", as one psychoanalyst said, and even put an end to war. But psychoanalytic discourse, with its emphasis on irrational desire and aggression, only seemed to confirm that nations would act recklessly.

Science, alas, ratified the fears it was meant to assuage: in the end, Overy suggests, it endorsed the view that was already becoming widespread, in which war was an inevitable feature of modern life. Conflict was no longer to be explained as the result of "ambitions or miscalculations of a handful of politicians and generals." Instead, war came to be seen as "something alien and external, endowed with an inexorable force which seemed to obey its own natural laws"—ones beyond the control of human agency.

"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality," wrote Joseph Conrad. It's a sentiment that Overy almost certainly shares. His book, he says, is a warning, and it tells us to be wary of men and women who come bearing theories about the end of civilisation. A society's obsession with its own destruction, he suggests, can actually hasten the outcome it seeks to avoid: Britain, of course, soon got the very war that it had for so long dreaded. The obsession with preventing war paradoxically made war more possible: "the more war was discussed and the more lurid the imagery invoked to describes its effects, the more war itself seemed to assume a solid shape in the popular mind and the narrower and more extreme became the options between an unattainable state of peace and an all-too attainable state of catastrophic war." (It was enough for one critic to protest: "Stop talking about war. If we talk about war much longer we may talk it into existence.)

For Overy, narratives of civilisational decline, in 1930s Britain or 2000s America, cannot but be overblown. "The constant theme of civilisation in crisis," he concludes, "if repeated often enough and in different contexts, develops an explanatory power that does not have to take account of any existing disjuncture between historical reality and the language of threat." Much of the material Overy surveys in The Morbid Age had a risibly short shelf life. But the language of threat, alas, is for all time.

This image, carefully fixed by Cheever himself, began dissolving with the publication of Falconer (1977), a prison novel of shocking force and lurid sexuality that awed many of his admirers and hinted at some kind of personal liberation. Its rapturous treatment of homoerotic desire and its horrific passages on addiction suggested Cheever was publicly owning up to something—and, in many ways, he was. In 1991, the publication of The Journals of John Cheever laid bare a life of prodigious drinking, infidelity, marital strife, lust, impotence, and agonized bisexuality. "The most wonderful thing about life seems to be that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction," mused Cheever, who did his best to refute his own proposition. (Among other things, the Journals are an essential document in the history of alcoholism.) In this private record, Cheever emerges a man beset by a welter of repression, resentments, and infinite reservoirs of despair. ("Shaken with liquor, self-doubts dimmed slightly by a Miltown, I board the nine o'clock. I am in misery. Every man on the train seems richer, more virile and intelligent than I.") There are bursts of his trademark lyricism, filled with the pleasure he took in observing the natural world—"the smell of burning holly and hemlock is like a vital perfume of life"—but for every small portion of joy, there is a greater share of desolation.

In his hefty biography Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey brings these disclosures further out of the shadows, training the megawatt glare of the authorized life onto Cheever's agonies and indiscretions. The prospect we are offered is a bleak one. If Cheever brought a zest and professionalism to the craft of the short story—the New Yorker style owes much to his efforts—he became positively consumed with creating the persona "John Cheever," a vocation that brought him fame and accolades but very nearly extinguished him. An artist who lived among businessmen, a man who loved men but hated homosexuality, a loving father who found it difficult to discharge the duties of fatherhood, a short-story sprinter who struggled over the long distances required of the novelist, Cheever took out a mortgage on a life he could never repay.

The author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003), Bailey has become something of a specialist in the lives of alcoholic practitioners of suburban realism, and it's only fitting he has moved on to one of the founding fathers of the genre (the other being a fellow New Yorker contributor, the much-denigrated John O'Hara). Cheever, however, is a greater writer than Yates and a more complex case. Bailey had access to every bit of Cheeveriana he could locate, including the vastness of the complete journals (only a selection was published in 1991), which run to forty-three hundred pages. The Journals are a masterwork unto themselves and provide a road map to the author's origins.

Cheever's ambivalence about his New England Protestant roots tugged at him. He liked to remind his children they were "Cheevahs," but he wasn't ever quite sure whether he came from the ruling class or a routed class, and joked he was descended from the "wrong Cheevers." Growing up on Massachusetts's South Shore, the young Cheever watched his father, a traveling shoe salesman who'd lost most of his money in the ’20s, go from a "jaunty golf-playing burgher to a sodden failure with a hacking cough who always seemed to be sitting on the porch with nothing to do," Bailey writes. Cheever was even more ashamed when his proud and stubborn mother opened a gift shop in Quincy. Years later, he wrote of his family that they were "sexual losers, sartorial losers, bums at the bank. Unclean outcasts whose destiny, written in the stars, was to empty garbage pails and pump the shit out of septic tanks but who, through some cultural miscalculation, imagined themselves being carried off the Lacrosse field on the shoulders of their teammates and then dancing with the prettiest girl in the world."

Cheever wouldn't end up pumping septic tanks, but the jobbing life of a writer would provide no quick escape from this fate. He left the private Thayer Academy—it isn't certain whether he was expelled or departed on his own initiative—and, like many writers of the time, ended up in New York in the orbit of the New Republic, where at eighteen he published his first story. A certified bohemian, Cheever circulated in Greenwich Village and got by on a meager income. The New Republic's literary editor, Malcolm Cowley, brought Cheever along; to his first mentor, he would later write, "You taught me to ... by-pass the French symbolists, train a retriever with a fresh egg, buy my shoes at Fortnum & Mason, catch a trout and keep my literary sights high and earnest." Vital lessons for an aspiring member of the gentry, but in the late ’30s, two other editors-about-town, the New Yorker's Katharine White and William Maxwell, transformed Cheever into a star.

Cheever's tenure at the New Yorker, which would publish his most famous stories, was the central literary relationship in his career. From the ’30s into the ’60s, the magazine nurtured and enraged him by turns; the fees it paid helped him to buy a house in Ossining (this despite the objections of the magazine's lawyer, who told Maxwell that "freelance writers should not own property"), but it also rejected scores of stories that were then published elsewhere, which did little to appease Cheever's feeling that he was always being crowded out by some other New Yorker writer, whether J. D. Salinger (the "Godamned sixth-rate Salinger"), John Updike, or Donald Barthelme ("The stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me.... Blooey. It's like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago").

With one eye on Cheever's bank account and the other on his prose, Bailey diligently tracks the author's editorial and monetary dealings with the magazine. In many ways, Cheever fit right into the publication's middlebrow cosmopolitanism. He did as much to create the mature New Yorker style as the magazine did to burnish his reputation as a master of the short-story form. An improviser who wrote at speed when so moved—there were long, paralyzing bouts of inactivity—he turned around work quickly. He was gratified to be writing for "estimable men and woman," and by the mid-’40s, he was on way to becoming an estimable man himself—outwardly, at least. Cheever never let a lack of funds deter him from his status ambitions; he said good-bye to bohemia and moved with his wife, Mary, and daughter, Susan, to a Sutton Place apartment well beyond their means. There, Cheever began to play a kind of double game. "Almost every morning for the next five years," Bailey writes, "he'd put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he'd doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch."

Cheever needed such rituals, but he was acutely aware what he was up to. Fussing over the monogram on a towel one evening in 1948, he mused in his journal about "this concern for outward order.... I was born into no true class, and it was my decision early in life, to insinuate myself into the middle class, like a spy, so that I would have an advantageous position of attack, but I seem now and then to have forgotten my mission and to have taken my disguises too seriously." He became a special kind of provincial writer, working the narrow terrain that stretched from Manhattan's East Side to the small hamlets along the Hudson River. Here, the money was oldish but not grand. The people were comfortable but not posh. His characters had to get out of bed in the morning—they were always running to catch the morning train. They sent their kids to private school, summered on the Cape, and drank way too much, closing out the evening session, which generally began around seven—if it hadn't already at noon—to the clink of glasses of gin.

Whatever Cheever's doubts about his place in tony circles, his outsider-as-insider status paid dividends. He wrote about the shabbily genteel milieu with a mixture of pathos, bitterness, nostalgia, and regret. The odd charm of the stories derives from how he mixes these tones. (Not always successfully—he had a smothering way with irony.) He could be wonderfully biting, as when, in "Just One More Time," he describes "the shoestring aristocrats of the upper East Side—the elegant, charming, and shabby men who work for brokerage houses, and their high-flown wives, with their thrift-shop minks and their ash-can fur pieces, their alligator shoes and their snotty ways with doormen and with the cashiers in supermarkets."

Much like Cheever himself, these people were precariously perched, in need of money and clutching after some last bit of respectability. "We both come from that enormous stratum of the middle class that is distinguished by its ability to recall better times," says the narrator of another story, talking about himself and his wife. "Lost money is so much a part of our lives that I am sometimes reminded of expatriates, of a group who have adapted themselves energetically to some alien soil but who are reminded, now and then, of the escarpments of their native coast." Don't be distracted by the brightness and energy, and listen for the morbid notes always breaking through the fizz of cocktail-party chatter: "She had known a man like that. He had worked day and night making money. He ruined his partners and betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children, and then, after making millions and millions of dollars, he went down to his office one Sunday afternoon and jumped out of the window."

Cheever held a cracked mirror up to the New Yorker's affluent readership. But his sociology was delivered in a playful, lilting, almost musical prose: The beginning of "O Youth and Beauty!" (that exclamation point might as well be a dagger)—"At the tag end of nearly every long, large Saturday-night party in the suburb of Shady Hill"—is almost hummable. Even if some critics found the tone irritating—Irving Howe dismissed him as "a toothless Thurber"—he wasn't a brassy show-off in the manner of Nabokov. There was a politesse to his writing that was appropriate to the venue and, all the better, allowed him to conceal his tricks and gibes.

Cheever didn't think much of his short stories; he wrote them to bring in money, though he suspected Maxwell was underpaying him. His relationship with his editor would come under strain after he decamped from Manhattan in the early ’50s to the town of Scarborough in Westchester County, where he spent the decade and more observing organization men and their stay-at-home wives. (Interesting fact: Cheever lived in the house once occupied by Yates, which was near a real Revolutionary Road.) Maxwell would steer into print Cheever's best fictional riffs on his suburban surroundings, among them "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill" and "The Five-Forty-Eight," but Cheever wondered whether he wasn't floundering, only this time in a more pastoral setting. "Every time I read a review of Saul Bellow I get the heaves. Oh this big, wild, rowdy country, full of whores and prizefighters, and here I am stuck with an old river in the twilight and the deterioration of the middle-aged businessman," he lamented in his journal circa 1953. (Cheever actually admired Bellow a great deal, and the two struck up an unlikely friendship.)

At the time, Cheever was in the midst of a decade-long struggle to complete his first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, which had plunged him back into his New England past and is now collected along with Cheever's four other novels in a spiffy Library of America edition, as the short stories are in another. A rambling, picaresque catalog of eccentrics and ham-handed antics, the novel obsessed Cheever as a way of transforming and exorcising his past. Although often strained and artificial sounding, this first effort to break out of the restrictions of his natural form won him a National Book Award in 1958. (For my money, along with the extraordinary Falconer, the critically drubbed Bullet Park [1969], when he went weird and wrote a ’60s novel without really meaning to, showcases the best of Cheever in long form.) Whatever doubts he had about his short fiction, he kept tinkering with the genre he helped perfect—see the 1960 story "Some People, Places and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel" for some spoofing postmodern high jinks, years before such stuff went mainstream—despite the growing exasperation of Maxwell.

Cheever was not happy when "The Swimmer," today his best-known story, appeared behind an Updike piece in 1964. ("This seems to me unintelligent and perhaps mean, but then one encounters much of both," he sneered.) Of the Gide-influenced exercise "The Jewels of the Cabots," Maxwell reportedly commented, "As God is my witness, this is not a story." By the end of the decade, the fed-up Cheever began shopping his work to Playboy. "They pay well and they are hospitable," he wrote a friend, "and the tits aren't any more distracting than the girdle advertisements in the New Yorker." Cheever, when he had to be, was all business.

The work Bailey put into this huge biography is laudable, but the latter stages of his book are troubling. By its very nature, biography is a voyeuristic form, but Bailey takes the prying to a harrowingly explicit level. (The index even provides an entry for "Cheever, naked in less-than-private situations.") "He and Mary still tried from time to time [to have sex], but it was no use: at best he could get started a bit, but rarely (if ever) finish," Bailey writes in a typical bit of close-up detail. No humiliation can pass the eagle eye of this author.

Certainly, Cheever conspired in his own diagnosis, keeping a careful record of ejaculations, sexual fantasies, liaisons, boozing, and bickering. He was as conscientious in documenting his inner life as he was in playing up his wasp bona fides. As a public figure, Cheever had arrived. "I am a Wasp, my God, look," a journalist quoted him as saying. Time magazine, which put him on its cover in 1964, drooled, "[Cheever] wears Brooks Brothers shirts with their conspicuously missing pockets and would never consider having a mongrel dog." But it was the ever-sharp Maxwell who perceptively summed it up: "Cheever was not, I think, content merely to be an artist. He wanted a place in society, to lead the life of upper-middle-class people as he saw it (with some idealization, I think). He would have liked to have had lots of money, entertained beautifully, been socially the best there was." Don Draper, you have nothing on John Cheever.

A spirited talker and compulsive, playful storyteller, Cheever tended to the theatrical, but this performance brought uncertain rewards. "Gin seems to be the only way out," he noted—he eventually needed bucket loads to get through the day. He told his doctor of his "anxious and greedy urge to take more than my share of brute pleasure." If he was frequently impotent with his wife, the frisky Cheever took pleasure with other women (there was an affair with a young student and a romp with the actress Hope Lange), his hand (often), and other men (at least a dozen over his life). He tried to contain his homosexual inclinations, but doing so only brought him more emotional derangement. He thrilled to the male body but was terrified of what would it do to him. Homosexuals, he worried, seemed "unserious, humorless and revolting." In one of the most haunting passages of the Journals, Cheever wrote, "If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol."

For Bailey, Cheever's dealings with other men always carried latent sexual charge. This is true, up to a point. In the tensions between Maxwell, himself conflicted in his sexuality, and Cheever, Bailey locates a tacit understanding between the two about their unspoken longings. Yet Bailey can push this line of inquiry too far. Of Cheever's praise for The Adventures of Augie March, Bailey writes, "He might have been less generous if he hadn't been so smitten with the man; yet I see this as Cheever merely linking up with a kinsman in the literary trade. Bailey daringly speculates that the young Cheever might have slept with his brother, Fred, a fellow alcoholic and ne'er-do-well. The brothers had an intensely complicated relationship—Cheever told a psychiatrist that it was "the most significant relationship in [his] life.... It was like a love affair." "Whether it was an actual love affair is hard to say," the probing biographer adds, "though it appears not to have been entirely platonic." Even if Cheever hinted at something more with Fred, there is much ambiguity here.

It's a wonder that Cheever, like that millionaire who "betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children," didn't jump out a window himself. He opted instead for the slow-motion immolation of drinking. The last sections of Cheever: A Life come close to being unbearable. His resentments toward Mary amplified, and his behavior toward his children erupted into viciousness. He harped on Susan's weight; he told his middle child, Ben, "You're pathetic," when he wasn't telling him, "You laugh like a woman." Bailey interviewed the Cheever children extensively—Susan and Ben, both now established authors in their own right, and the youngest son, Fred—and their testimony is frequently heartbreaking. "Cheever loved being a father in the abstract, but the everyday facts of the matter were often a letdown," Bailey observes. Yet even when he wasn't grappling with the difficulties of child rearing, Cheever found himself despondent all on his own. "My bowels are open, my balls are ticklish, my work moves, my children are well and unprecedentedly happy, I love my wife, my house is warm, so why should I wake in throes of melancholy," he wrote in early 1967.

He would never find a satisfactory answer to that question, even if his last years brought a measure of peace. By the early ’70s, Cheever, a shambling, sodden wreck, all but ceased to function. A teaching stint at Boston University was a near disaster—he lived in a grubby flat, neglected his teaching duties, and took to drinking fortified wine with bums on park benches. When a cop harassed him, the writer, his hauteur bristling, told him, "My name is John Cheever." But in this wretched phase—Updike found his idol naked one evening outside the older man's apartment—Cheever began gathering himself for Falconer. Spirited to Manhattan's Smither's Alcoholism Treatment and Training Center by Fred, Cheever was pummeled into sobriety. His fellow patients didn't buy his superior act, and the staff psychologist compared him to Uriah Heep: "He is a classic denier who moves in and out of focus. He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalized many rather imperious upper class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same time."

Given the edifice Cheever constructed for himself over the decades, the writing of Falconer was a brave act. Some of the details he drew from his time as a creative-writing teacher in Sing Sing, but into the character of Ezekiel Farragut, Cheever put his most personal feelings about his desires and afflictions. "I like to think of Falconer as the sum of everything I've ever known and smelled and tasted," he told Newsweek. Many of his decorous New Yorker readers must have been shocked to find their John Cheever writing the following scene, a tableau of men masturbating in a bathroom, where Farragut has gone to watch and participate: "There were the frenzied and compulsive pumpers, the long-timers who caressed themselves for half an hour, there were the groaners and the ones who sighed, and most of the men, when their trigger was pulled and the fusillade began, would shake, buck, catch their breath and make weeping sounds, sounds of grief, of joy, and sometimes death rattles." But Cheever could finally say to himself, as Farragut does in the novel's closing line, rejoice, rejoice.

Liberalism is the most capacious of political terms, and defining it can be a vexing pursuit. The Ted Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party in the United States is often described as "liberal"; but so too is Friedrich Hayek, the laissez-faire economist and hero of the libertarian right. In American political culture, liberals tend to stand on the left. But in a European context, "liberal" generally describes a supporter of free-market capitalism. Anti-globalisation activists take to the streets against "neoliberal" economics. One version of liberalism asserts the primacy of liberty; another, equality.

Writing earlier this year in the New York Times, the English political journalist Timothy Garton Ash put forth one definition. "A plausible minimum list of ingredients for 21st-century liberalism," he wrote, "would include liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism, and some notion of human equality, reason and progress." Any way you parse it, liberalism is, by its very nature, a sometimes unstable mixture of competing goods and ideals.

Liberalism's roots stretch back to the intellectual and political tumult of the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe was casting off the shackles of feudalism and monarchy. It is, at its core, is a doctrine grounded in the freedom of the individual. Constitutions enshrined rights and set out limits to check the use of arbitrary power by the state; liberty and equality became rallying cries. But if liberalism became identified with specific political goals, it emerged from a deeper shift in sensibility, as sceptics challenged religious orthodoxy and thinkers advanced new ideas about human nature and the role of institutions in society. Liberalism, then, was a philosophical orientation before it was a political one.

The principles of liberalism, in whatever combination, are now in operation in much of the West. In the United States, many have taken the election of Barack Obama as a return to the New Deal liberalism that dominated American politics until the late 1960s. But according to Alan Wolfe, this does not mean liberalism itself is thriving — "conservatism's increasing problems," he writes in The Future of Liberalism, "in no way guarantee liberalism's political success."

For liberalism, which Wolfe calls "the dominant, if not always appreciated, political philosophy of modern times," today suffers from "a crisis of confidence". Wolfe submits his new book as a corrective: a return to the glories of liberal philosophy intended to stiffen the spine of liberal politics. Wolfe takes the reader on an invigorating tour of liberal thought over the last 300 years, from John Locke to Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey and John Maynard Keynes, as he makes the case for the necessity of liberalism. For Wolfe, the term has three definitions. In the first, liberalism is a political commitment to realising both liberty and equality, and its core principle, according to Wolfe, is that "as many people should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take". The second, what Wolfe calls "procedural liberalism", refers to an adherence to rules applied fairly and impartially applied to all. Lastly, he writes, it may be characterised by a distinctive temperament, one that "seeks to include rather than exclude, to accept rather than to censor, to respect rather than stigmatise, to welcome rather than reject, to be generous and appreciative rather than stingy and mean".

In a 1999 essay, Wolfe identified in liberalism a "certain protean quality", and his own definition tends to be as mutable as the philosophy he seeks to describe. For him, liberalism is attached to no party or faction; both liberal proceduralism and the liberal temperament are "trans-ideological". "A conservative who opposes liberalism's commitment to the welfare state," Wolfe argues, "but who gives generously to charity is acting liberally." His aim is to reassert the tenets of what he calls a "pre-political" liberalism, one that harks back to the buzzing ferment of the Enlightenment. "Liberalism," Wolfe writes, "tells us not so much what to think but more about how to think," and he sets out a series of "dispositions" by which we might understand its direction: a sympathy for equality, and an appreciation for openness, debate, pragmatism, reasoned negotiation, tolerance and the art of governance.

For all of these reasons, Wolfe argues, liberalism is the most suitable political doctrine for our times — indeed, he says, liberalism is the political doctrine that most suits modernity itself. (He makes many such sweeping claims.) "It is liberalism's underlying philosophy," Wolfe writes, "its understanding of human nature, its respect for both individualism and equality, its discovery of the social, its passion for justice, its preference for experience over theory, its intellectual openness, its commitment to fairness — that offers us the surest path toward individual freedom and a collective sense of purpose."

Wolfe's argument for liberalism is that it alone offers the means to ensure that all individuals have the opportunity to grow and flourish. Throughout the book, he counterposes the virtuous creation of "culture" against the malevolent defenders of "nature", an opposition he traces back to the debate between Kant, one of the author's heroes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who plays the bad guy. Where Kant believed society and its institutions could lift the lot of mankind, Rousseau thought civilisation rubbish and humans hopelessly imperfect, impervious to efforts at improvement.

Culture, as Wolfe construes it, stands for all that is good: science, technology, cosmopolitanism, the welfare state, religion in its more moderate forms, optimism, the belief in unlimited human potential. The apologists for nature, by contrast, peddle varieties of illiberalism that stifle the opportunity for individual growth. Like many defenders of the faith before him, Wolfe relishes the denunciation of liberalism's putative "enemies" — and he sees Rousseau's naysaying heirs everywhere, thwarting our potential with their incessant pessimism: Christian fundamentalists, who believe human beings are inherently depraved; sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, who think we cannot escape our genetic fate; "radical ecologists" who think the Earth would be better off without humans; and laissez-faire economists who believe equality is but a delusion.

"We are what we make of ourselves," Wolfe writes, and "liberals cannot, and should not, adopt the idea that people are inevitably helpless victims of forces larger than themselves." It is an admirable creed — but then again, people are indeed often the victims of forces larger than themselves, if not inevitably so, and Wolfe's unrestrained ire for critics of contemporary society sometimes verges toward an angry sort of Panglossianism: if his liberalism is the apex of reasonableness, he implies, dissident voices traffic only in unreason.

He aligns the construction of culture, broadly defined, with the pursuit of freedom, and he is at his best when he articulates the specific ambitions of "substantive liberalism" — the effort to achieve both liberty and equality. The book's finest passage may be his account of how the welfare state, which he sees as one of culture's supreme innovations, advances the goals of individual growth. "The welfare state is premised upon the assumption that while nature's effects can be tragic, society's need not be." He does not accept the famous distinction, posited by Isaiah Berlin, between "negative" liberty — simple freedom from interference — and a "positive" liberty in which a state or society commits itself to fostering the potential for growth and equality. ("Liberty is liberty," Berlin wrote, "not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.")

According to Wolfe, the resources of government — inevitably flawed as it may be — must be brought to bear on the forces that disrupt the drive to human equality. The welfare state, Wolfe contends, is the realisation of one of liberalism's most cherished goals: individual sovereignty. It does not, as conservatives charge, foster dependency, but rather promotes the kind of mobility conservatives should welcome. It's a mistake, he says, to associate liberalism with Big Government: "liberalism has never been in favour of the state as an end in itself. The key liberal idea has instead been self-mastery."

Yoking together liberalism's two senses — liberty and equality — Wolfe writes that "the welfare state aims to give individuals the autonomy they need to make their own choices about the kind of life they wish to lead. The welfare state in this sense is an exercise in self-governance; just as liberals in the eighteenth century held that people need not be ruled by the arbitrary powers of a monarch, twentieth century liberals insisted that people's lives need not be determined by the arbitrary gyrations of economic performance."

In order for individuals to truly flourish, Wolfe contends, conditions of equality need to prevail. Liberty only takes us halfway to the full sense of liberalism: the important question is not whether we are "free", but in what condition we enjoy that freedom. Wolfe returns to the great age of liberal thought, he writes, to give strength and direction to liberalism today — to remind "ourselves about what liberalism has stood for". The distinct implication is that liberals were right then, since we can see clearly how their ideas have shaped the present; therefore, it is asserted, they must also be correct now.

And indeed, the "trans-ideological" senses of liberalism have widely prevailed: today almost no western society objects to liberal proceduralism. Democratic institutions and the rule of law may not prevail worldwide, but there is a solid consensus that nations should strive towards these goals. Liberalism may or may not be the philosophy "best suited" for modernity — but it has become the default one.

Wolfe, however, rarely concedes liberalism's limitations. Take just about any issue facing the West today, Wolfe tells us — immigration, terrorism, the place of religion in society, government secrecy, the economic consequences of globalisation — sprinkle some of liberalism's magic dust on it, and a solution is at hand.

Wolfe identifies a realistic modesty as one of liberalism's hallmarks, but he is offering a rather immodest vision. An implication, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, ripples across the pages of The Future of Liberalism: if we'd only taste of liberalism's sweet reasonableness, then the world would be a better place. As Wolfe sees it, liberalism seems to encompass all that is right and good, and pity those who do not see things this way. At times, with his checklist of liberal virtues, he can be as rigid as a political commissar sniffing out smelly little heresies. Wolfe preaches an open mind — indeed, as he repeatedly notes, this is one of liberalism's sacred tenets — but he tends to dismiss all those who stand beyond the pale of his own philosophy.

Liberals are not the only ones who pass off their theories as a reflection of the natural order — for this, in many ways, is the central philosophy of conservatism — but they may be the only ones who forcefully deny they are doing so. This is dirty secret of The Future of Liberalism. Wolfe's readings of Mill and Kant are bracing, and his defence of the welfare state generally solid, but if you press the logic of his claims, you end up with something very much like a liberal version of natural law. Wolfe holds liberalism's truths to be self-evident, when they are no such thing.

Early newspapers were primitive in design, with a mix of foreign and domestic items, many borrowed from other papers. Newsprint was expensive, and circulations tended to be small. All of this would change by the late 19th century, with the rise of a mass press. Telegraphs relayed news in a flash to editors, new printing presses allowed publishers to respond rapidly to breaking news, and bulging Sunday editions were born. Illustrations and bold headlines were deployed to grab readers, as were sections devoted to sport, women and the comics.

Few in the history of newspapering did more to exploit these developments than William Randolph Hearst. This buccaneering Californian, whose caricature was immortalised in Citizen Kane, was arguably the most powerful newspaper publisher in history. By the 1920s — the height of his fame and influence — he owned papers in nearly every major American city, and his interests extended to magazines, radio, motion pictures and real estate. His art collection was immense, as was his extravagant mansion in San Simeon, California.

He was also detested. In the annals of vilification, even Rupert Murdoch is no match for Hearst. A catalogue of his sins — actual and alleged — would fill a book. From his early days as a publisher in Gilded Age San Francisco and New York into his mature years as a titan, Hearst inspired an intense hatred. He was accused of cheap sensationalism and trafficking in falsehoods. He was blamed for causing the Spanish-American War of 1898 and pandering to the reader's worst instincts with his craven brand of "yellow journalism". His critics were legion—AJ Liebling, one of Hearst's most eloquent foes, said he used money "like a club". Others called him a megalomaniac and an unhinged madman.

The image of Hearst as a ruthless mogul is a part of journalism lore. Certainly, there is a good deal that was unsavoury about the man: in the 1930s, Hearst papers ran columns by Hitler and Mussolini and savaged Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. (He ordered that all his papers call it the Raw Deal.) But lately his reputation has been getting a second look. David Nasaw's prize-winning biography, The Chief, published in 2000, presented a more complex flesh and blood Hearst, not some cartoon villain. Nasaw is tough when he needs to be, but also fair-minded. Now the Canadian journalist Kenneth Whyte has delivered a more radical revision to the Hearst reputation, with a biography focused narrowly on Hearst's early career and his entry into the frenzied New York newspaper market in the 1890s. The Uncrowned King is very nearly an all-out hagiography, but it is a book of its moment. At a time when English-language newspapers are losing readers by the millions and laying off staff by the hundreds, Whyte's biography is a lament for the glory days of print — for an era in which powerful men like Hearst owned newspapers and transformed the news business into a mighty force of its own.

For Whyte, the founding editor of Canada's National Post, Hearst was nothing less than a genius. Whyte wants to recast the terms of the debate: the job of a newspaper publisher is to sell newspapers; Hearst did that spectacularly well. Hearst, Whyte writes, mastered the now "almost forgotten arts of attracting readers and building circulation against established competition" — yet many of Hearst's critics act as if increasing readership was "a reprehensible activity". Certainly, he pushed an agenda, but he also won an audience, and the proof is in the circulation figures.

The Uncrowned King is a journalist's book, about the day-to-day business of gathering the news and putting out the paper in a hyper-competitive market. Whyte says nothing about the present moment, but his book is a stark reminder of how timid and dreary so many newspapers have become, and of how the newspaper industry has, of late, squandered the preeminent place it once held in the lives of its readers.

Journalism Hearst-style could be extreme and over the top, but it was also supremely entertaining and bold. Hearst came at the reader with a relentless style; he made reading the news an event unto itself. There may be nothing that can save the newspaper industry from the crisis it faces today, but the drab entities that own most American newspapers, corporations with bland names like MediaNews Group, have been their own worst enemies, producing colourless papers lacking in style and spirit — the very things the dynamic Hearst delivered daily.

Born in 1856 to a wealthy father who made a fortune in mining, William Randolph Hearst was a Harvard dropout and a natural newspaperman. At 31, he was given control of his father's failing San Francisco paper, the Examiner, and quickly transformed it into a leading daily. Though Hearst was well-to-do, he fancied himself a crusader for the downtrodden; one of his employees noted that he had "a real sympathy for the submerged man and woman, a real feeling of his own mission to plead their cause." Hearst's sense of mission could curdle into a deranged messianism, but, from top to bottom, he had an unfailing knack for making a good paper. He considered the newspaper in its totality as a printed object, and few details escaped his notice: he obsessed over tone, design, illustration, advertising, circulation, and marketing in equal measure. (Whyte writes nicely that Hearst "was a nuisance about headlines, treating each one as though it would alone tease another hundred readers from the competition to his own sheet.")

For Hearst, newspapering was a kind of democratic art, and this instinct propelled him into the greatest newspaper market in America — New York City. In the 1890s, the city hummed with a highly literate population of 3.8 million that supported no less than 17 major dailies. Casting around for an attractive property, Hearst settled on the ailing Morning Journal, which had been haemorrhaging circulation. Hearst's acquisition of the Journal in 1895 set the stage for one of the greatest showdowns in newspaper history, pitting the arriviste from the American west against the king of the New York market, Joseph Pulitzer, owner of the mighty World, whose slogan — "2 cents, circulation nearly one-half million per day" — neatly summarised its dominance.

A relentless self-promoter, Pulitzer created his own publishing revolution in Gotham, locking up New York's working class readers, whose interests had been largely ignored by staid upmarket papers like the Herald and the Tribune, which were aimed at commercial elites. "Pulitzer's World locked arms with working men and women, taking their enthusiasms, aspirations, and emotions as their own," Whyte writes. For Hearst, Pulitzer served as both a model to be emulated and a competitor to be smashed. Hearst learned a great deal from his rival as he retooled the Journal — and lured away Pulitzer's top talent. He mixed lurid crime stories with trustbusting campaigns, lengthy items about politics and exposes about municipal corruption, adding breezy columns like "Caught in the Metropolitan Whirl". He cleaned up the paper's design, and tweaked the visual side, adding realistic illustrations that broke up the columns of type. New pages were devoted to sport and business coverage. He launched a thick Sunday edition to compete with the Sunday World. He was not an aloof proprietor. The workaholic Hearst fussed over headlines and captions, often working late into the night. He priced the Journal at one cent, directly undercutting the more expensive World. The formula succeeded brilliantly: within three months, circulation doubled.

Whyte's account of the Pulitzer-Hearst battle runs sharply counter to the conventional wisdom, which dismissed the populist tactics of the World and the Journal alike as "yellow journalism." For Whyte, the term — like "sensationalism" — is meaningless and subjective. As Hearst's Journal used to say, taunting the competition, sensationalism "is always the cry of the newspaper to the rival which passes it".

Whyte argues that Hearst merely had a feel for the spirit of the time: "It was an age of sensation. The public space was awash in febrile emotions.... Hearst did not set the mood, but he revelled in it and amply exposed its less savoury dimensions to his readers."

The Journal sported headlines like "Beheaded, cast into the river," and dispatched the novelist Stephen Crane to Manhattan's seamy Tenderloin district, where he caused a scandal of his own after testifying on behalf of a prostitute. But the paper also ran serious articles about politics and civic affairs. Hearst devoted hundreds of pages to events in Cuba in the months prior to the Spanish-American. His coverage there has a notorious reputation in the history of journalism, one that is largely undeserved, Whyte contends. The old canard that Hearst provoked the conflict does not withstand scrutiny; as for the legendary telegram he allegedly sent the illustrator Frederic Remington — "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war" — it does not exist. Nor was Hearst the only publisher concerned with Spain — all of his major rivals gave prominent coverage to the conflict.

Whyte also takes Hearst's populism seriously: "Hearst hammered away frenetically, day after day, week after week, at privately held trusts in ice, water, gas, sugar, rubber, coal and railways. As an activist and community servant, Hearst was operating with a vigour, scope and conviction unprecedented in American newspapers." Whyte disputes the notion that Hearst was a careless businessman — he used family money to finance his purchase of the Journal, but he eventually made money. Even so, Hearst was "far more interested in making a great paper than in turning a profit."

He also wanted to exert influence, no matter the cost. Almost alone among New York publishers, Hearst supported the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896. If the Journal's pro-Bryan stance offended commercial interests, so be it: "Advertisers called on me and said they would take out every advertisement if I continued to support Bryan," Hearst recalled, "and I told them to take out their advertisements, as I needed more space in which to support Bryan."

Whyte has read deeply in the newspapers of the day, and his account challenges us to think afresh about the kind of journalism Hearst perfected, even if it is occasionally overzealous in his defence. Though Hearst may now be acquitted on the charge of "causing" the Spanish-American War, it is indisputable that the Journal was frequently reckless with the facts. Even Whyte meekly concedes the point, but he cannot do so without providing an alibi: "Hearst probably did publish more sloppy and inaccurate news than other papers, not to foment war but because he published more news than his rivals, good and bad."

But this laboured defence still doesn't dent Whyte's case: if reading the paper is a kind of morning prayer, then Hearst created grand cathedrals. By focusing on Hearst's early years, Whyte brings the man and his papers back into focus, out from behind the shadow of the larger-than-life Hearst of legend — the movie mogul and fixture of society pages; the populist-turned-red-baiting demagogue, who used his media empire to promote a dark, almost fascist agenda. The later Hearst is easy to vilify, but the young newsman is a complex, even sympathetic figure.

Lovers of newsprint have aired innumerable ideas to save the papers, from non-profit endowments to government bailouts; what most of them share is the sanctimonious presumption that newspapers, as guardians of the public trust, must be preserved at all costs.

It is ironic that many who would have heaped scorn on Hearst are now yearning for a modern-day William Randolph to ride to the rescue. Even Hearst probably couldn't solve the papers' current predicament, but his example is still relevant: newspapers, he understood, are businesses that deliver a valuable commodity, the news. When they do it well, with style and energy, readers will follow. Newspapers, in other words, must earn the public's attention before they can guard its trust.

At 44, Ferguson is already perhaps the most accomplished historian of his generation. A brash, telegenic and media-savvy Scotsman, Ferguson is as comfortable in front of the camera — he has presented a number of television documentaries — as he is with the arcana of economic history.

Ferguson is a number cruncher: his work bristles with charts, graphs and tables, but his prose is readable, fluent, even brisk. In his several books, he has tackled the very biggest themes of history — war, money and empire. Ferguson, in some ways, looks back to the grand, synthesising tradition of a Macaulay. He works in broad strokes, but his arguments are backed up by cutting-edge economic research and an almost bewildering array of data. And he's not afraid to cause a stir.

Like an impish if clever schoolboy, Ferguson seems to take delight in overturning conventional wisdom. In The Pity of War, a provocative study of the First World War, he argued that Britain, not Germany, turned a regional crisis in the Balkans — the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo — into a global cataclysm. Ferguson, noting that Germany is now Europe's dominant power, argued that had Britain sat out the war and let the Kaiser win, "continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today." Ferguson likes to ponder alternative historical scenarios — he even edited a collection of essays on counterfactual history — but this particular provocation struck many of his critics as ludicrous.

The cause for which he may now be best known — an unstinting defence of the British Empire — is no less controversial. But Ferguson's claims about British imperialism aren't merely nostalgia; he has a serious argument to make about the role of empires in the expansion of global capital. For Ferguson, the British Empire was largely a force for good. "No organisation in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital, and labour than the British Empire in the 19th century and early 20th centuries," he wrote in his 2003 book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Ferguson says that United States is the rightful heir to Britain's role as a tribune of "Anglobalisation", but remains an "empire in denial". (Ferguson supported the Iraq war, but has criticised the occupation). Not surprisingly, such notions earned Ferguson the scorn of the postcolonial studies crowd — one British academic called the historian "the Leni Riefenstahl of George's Bush new imperial order."

Ferguson's historiography tends to discount the role of independence movements and colonial revolts in the Empire's demise. Britain lost its empire, Ferguson argues, because it lacked the will to maintain it.

The Empire, he has argued, was undone by understretch, not overstretch. Britain, he contends, failed to present a convincing threat — a larger army — to deter German ambitions, and thus had to fight two enormously costly wars, conflicts that drastically accelerated imperial decline. Deterrence was the far cheaper option: in his most recent book, The War of the World, Ferguson suggested that Britain could have crushed the Wehrmacht by launching a pre-emptive strike against Hitler's undermanned armies in 1938.

Ferguson doesn't excuse the brutalities of imperialism so much as he looks past them: he tends to view the empire as a giant balance sheet. Where others see exploitation, Ferguson sees investment opportunities and capital flows. However, for all his concern with cash transactions, Ferguson is not an economic determinist. Money, as he sees it, does not make the world go round, though it certainly helps it spin. In his account, the rise of finance — the development of increasingly sophisticated instruments to multiply money — accompanied the ambitions of modern states for territorial expansion. The institutions of modern economic life — a strong central bank to print and manage currency; government fiscal policy; stock and bond markets — emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries to make it possible for revenue-hungry states to wage war, an idea Ferguson outlined in his densest, most theoretical work, The Cash Nexus, a study of money and power in the modern world.

The Ascent of Money is a more user-friendly version of that book, sheared of its ponderous complexities and breezy in tone. ("If the pension plan falls short, never mind. If you run out of health insurance, don't panic. There is always home, sweet home.") It is more a primer of economic ABCs than a sustained argument. Given the high calibre of much of Ferguson's work, it is also a disappointment. There are provocations here, but the book feels like a collection of magazine articles cobbled together between covers. Doffing his journalist's hat, Ferguson touches down in Memphis, Tennessee, the bankruptcy capital of the United States; the devastated working class neighbourhoods of Detroit, reeling from the sub prime mortgage crisis; and La Paz, Bolivia, where he checks in on an experiment in microfinance.

"The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man," Ferguson writes. "Financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man's advance from wretched subsistence to this giddy heights of material prosperity that so many people know today." (The manuscript was completed in May, before the credit crisis mutated into a full blown recession and sent many of those who occupied the "giddy heights" into free fall.)

The story Ferguson tells is the evolution of money into finance. As he puts it, money is not some metallic object; rather "it is trust inscribed." But money itself is inert: it can be traded for goods and services, or saved for a rainy day, but left alone it does not compound and multiply into prosperity. Finance harvests the potential energy of money and transforms it into force — and binds people and institutions into new relationships, central among them the tie between lender and borrower.

More than anything, Ferguson argues, the growth of these relationships explain the growth of a system of finance: "Without the foundation of borrowing and lending, the economic history of our world would have scarcely gotten off the ground." He takes a brisk historical tour, surveying how the Medici family transformed banking in 15th century Florence by being larger than their competitors and spreading risk. In Holland, the modern joint stock company began with the United East India Company and its monopoly on the spice trade in the Far East. He details the emergence of the British bond market in the 18th century, and "the most successful bond ever issued," the British consol, created in 1752 to convert all Britain's outstanding debt into a single bond, which still exists today.

The emergence of markets for government debt made it possible for the British to finance their frequent wars with France, which suffered from a creaky financial system. Ferguson also provides a brisk account of the Rothschild family, who made a mint on the bond market during the Napoleonic wars.

A lot of this is old hat for Ferguson — he wrote an acclaimed two-volume biography of the Rothschilds, and has cribbed at will from his previous writings. He throws off ideas willy-nilly, and leaps around from past to present at a dizzying clip. But the history Ferguson recounts is not merely an exercise. Finance, he is saying, is no less essential to our understanding of the modern era than war or politics. What he describes is the enormously complicated transformation of money by powerful instruments — not only bonds and stocks, which are centuries old, but totally newfangled beasts like mortgage-backed securities, derivatives and an otherworldly species called collateralised debt obligations. Money begat credit and credit begat leverage, and leverage more sophisticated means of increasing leverage. And herein lies the problem.

About the present moment, Ferguson says, it is no ordinary financial crisis. As his history shows, the cycle of boom and bust is endemic to the rise of finance. There have been panics, bank busts and stock market swoons for centuries; but we are entering a new phase of financial derangement. Credit and leverage have become detached from tangible economic growth. Borrowing led the way — fueled by the risky presumption that asset prices would continue to rise and rise.

Nowhere was this more true than the American housing market. Ferguson's chapter on the origins of the subprime mortgage is his sharpest, most original and most contrary. He argues that the notion of home ownership is a peculiar novelty in the English-speaking world. "For most of history... it was the exclusive privilege of an aristocratic elite." The move from a culture of tenants to one of owners — what Ferguson calls "property owning democracy" — began in the United States during the Great Depression. New Deal agencies like the Federal Housing Administration and spin-offs like Fannie Mae made it possible for more Americans to own homes than ever before, at the same time creating a secondary mortgage market that reduced average monthly payments. The US government was now in the mortgage business, and property ownership boomed.

But Ferguson is sceptical about this universal drive to home ownership; for him it is something like a cult built on an illusion. (Houses, Ferguson notes, are illiquid assets, difficult to sell quickly.) The explosion of subprime mortgages, often to poor black and Latino buyers, might be seen as "the zenith of the property owning democracy." But the secondary mortgage market, which repackaged subprime debt and sold it to the highest bidder, severed the old link between debtor and creditor. Once, there had been "meaningful social ties between mortgage lenders and borrowers," who often lived in the same community. No longer.

Ferguson doesn't come right out and say it, but he seems to lament the disappearance what might be called capitalism with a human face — or at least a face that you know. By taking risky subprime mortgages, bundling them together into securities, and selling them on global markets, Wall Street made a packet. Ferguson's thumbnail sketch of the new dynamic between borrower and lender is powerfully cogent: "The key to this financial alchemy was that there could be thousands of miles between the mortgage borrowers in Detroit and the people who ended up receiving their interest payments. The risk was spread across the globe from American state pension funds to public health networks in Australia and even to town councils beyond the Arctic circle."

There is geopolitical dimension to the phenomena that Ferguson also finds troubling, namely that America's imperial rival — China — bankrolled the whole thing. The vast pool of Chinese savings, lent out to the United States, "was the underlying reason why the US mortgage market was so awash in cash that you get a 100 per cent mortgage with no income, no job or assets." Chillingly, Ferguson reminds us the last time there was such "a fine line between symbiosis and rivalry," it was the eve of the First World War, and the two countries were Britain and Germany.

Ferguson is a pessimist, but he backs away from any radical prescriptions to address the problem (perhaps because they aren't any; the crisis takes on a new dimension almost daily). For him, individual initiative is the remedy, and he takes a page out of a Charles Schwab brochure to offer some canned advice: "The key to financial security," he tells us, "should be a properly diversified portfolio of assets." Putting it all in the house and on "the far from risk-free property market" is a one-way bet that's bound to fail. After a dazzling account of the subprime crisis that showcases Ferguson's sure grasp of 21st-century finance and his willingness to buck convention, such bathos is little more than cold comfort.

In the spare and bleak "Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia," the Polish journalist Wojciech Tochman chronicles the aftermath of war in Bosnia and, if anything, confirms that the so-called peace has brought little actual peace. Yet he is not polemical about this point; instead, he relies on suggestive details, pungent quotes and simple, understated prose that is mannered at times but powerful in its own way.

Crisscrossing Bosnia several years after the war's end, Tochman follows several Muslim women as they search for the remains of loved ones: husbands, children, parents. By the end of the war, nearly 20,000 Muslims were missing, and the process of recovering bodies, many of them dumped into mass graves, mine shafts and waste dumps, is proceeding with agonizing slowness.

Tochman is an austere scene setter. Here, he describes the efforts of Ewa Klonowski, a Polish forensic anthropologist connected to the Bosniak Commission on Missing Persons, as she works at a mass grave: "Now the first white body bags are coming up. The workmen lay them out on the grass. The relatives of the missing people stand around as Dr. Klonowski examines the bones, identifying their age and sex." Her work is grim — she has recovered some 2,000 bodies — but she takes pride in her vocation. "I love bones; bones speak to me," she tells Tochman. "I can determine nationality by bones. A Muslim's femur is bent into a slight arc, because Muslims squat."

The survivors themselves don't view things with such scientific detachment. Jasna Ploskic, a Muslim widow searching for the remains of her small children, presumed killed in 1992 when they fled their village after it came under attack, says of the Serbs: "In every one of them I see a murderer." Many Muslims, expelled from their homes by Serbs, want their property returned, but are reluctant to live in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia.

If Tochman is sympathetic to Bosnia's Muslims as they struggle to make their way, he also takes a nuanced view of the much vilified Serbs. The Serb Republic of Bosnia is an economic backwater, and many Serbs Tochman encounters share their regrets with him: "What on earth was the point of the war?" asks one Serb woman threatened with eviction. Tochman visits the eastern mining town of Srebrenica, site of the infamous 1995 massacre of Muslim men and boys. Once dominated by Muslims, it has become a haunted place. Even if it is now a part of Serbian Bosnia, few Serbs feel comfortable there, Tochman writes. "They say: 'This isn't our home. This is a Muslim town, a town of death and bloodshed. And voices that come from God knows where. Whispers, screams, wailing.'" Other Bosnian Serbs can only point fingers: "More Serbs were killed in Sarajevo than Muslims in Srebrenica," a social worker insists. "You must understand that, and not invent all that Dayton peace nonsense, mass graves, tribunals, all that sort of thing."

There are few more loaded phrases than "humanitarian intervention". At once too broad and too narrow, it lends itself perfectly to empty sloganeering, and worse. After all, Vladimir Putin defended the invasion of Georgia partly on humanitarian grounds — to defend ethnic Ossetians — even if much of the world saw things differently. But Putin invoked the same kind of language Nato used to justify its campaign in Kosovo, an action Russia vigorously opposed. If any war with a humanitarian component can be called a humanitarian intervention, the term is so broad as to be meaningless. But if the term is defined narrowly, one could argue that few, if any, wars, have been fought for humanitarian reasons alone.

The American Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously said, of pornography, "I know it when I see it." But can we say no more about humanitarian interventions?

In the learnt, witty, and well-meaning Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, Gary Bass argues there is a distinction to be made. Against the brutish cynicism of Putin, or, even worse, Adolf Hitler, who invaded Czechoslovakia to "protect" the country's ethnic German minority, Bass makes the case that genuine humanitarian interventions are deeply grounded in the ideology of liberalism. Though Bass doesn't fully address the term's nagging ambiguities — he knows a genuine intervention when he sees it — his intention is to recover an honourable tradition of foreign interventions dating back to the 19th century, one which might guide today's liberal states and help promote international justice.

Using history as a guide for policy-making has its perils, but Bass is not shy about drawing analogies between the 19th century and our own time. Humanitarian interventions, however, are not always what they seem, and the story he tells tends to complicate his prescriptions.

Bass highlights the era in which a "human rights" doctrine emerged, taking a vivid historical tour of a series of diplomatic crises that pitted the Ottoman Empire against Britain, Russia, and France, as well as the Armenian genocide during the First World War. These conflicts, like the one over Bulgaria in the 1870s, where Ottoman irregulars massacred thousands of Christians, were driven less by traditional reasons for war — economic gain and territorial conquest — than by newfangled principles devoted to saving threatened populations and halting mass slaughter. "Humanitarian intervention," Bass concludes, "emerged as a fundamental enterprise, wrapped up with the progress of liberal ideas and institutions." Bass points to the evolution of a free press in Britain and France as a key component in the first humanitarian interventions: newspapers publicised atrocities, moved the public, and gave politicians fits. Public opinion was mobilised, which in turn spurred politicians to take action abroad.

The structure of Freedom's Battle is awkward, the equivalent of an overstuffed sandwich. Bass's preliminary and concluding theoretical chapters, which lay out a case for interventions in the 21st century, are laboured, repetitive, dryly analytic, but the meat of his story is colourful and evocative, teeming with a who's who of politics and culture from the Victorian era and after — Byron and Dostoyevsky; Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, great foes and political titans; Metternich and Lord Castlereagh, architects of the post-Napoleonic European order; Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Bass is an entertaining historian, and he livens his text with pungent quotes and sharp appraisals of his dramatis personae. About Gladstone, Bass writes: "Originally not much of a democrat, he had learnt to appreciate the genius of the masses, so long as they agreed with him." On TR, Bass sharply observes that "Roosevelt's humanitarianism was always militarised." (See John McCain.)

The terms of humanitarian intervention were ferociously argued, and Bass's pages resound with passionate arguments for and against. (A better subtitle for Freedom's Battle might be "The Origins of the Debate over Humanitarian Intervention".) Bass, though he can twist himself into knots, is keen to show that the strictures of realpolitik and the moral fervour of humanitarianism need not be incompatible. It's a trick, however, that requires some historical sleight of hand.

After Napoleon rampaged all over Europe, his victorious opponents were determined to ensure peace at all costs. For Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, "the safety and repose of Europe" were paramount. But the stirrings of independence in Greece in the 1820s would put the post-Napoleonic order to the test. After Greek insurgents attempted to break away from the Ottoman Empire, their rulers responded savagely, burning Orthodox churches and killing Greeks in Constantinople and Smyrna. In London, philhellenes like Byron and Jeremy Bentham, carried away with romantic ideas about ancient Greece — "the first enlightened nation", as Bentham dubbed it — took up the Greek cause. (Some, like Byron, even volunteered to fight in Greece; the poet would die there in 1824).

Bass is too thoughtful a historian to present these conflicts in terms of good versus evil, and, throughout Freedom's Battle, he stresses just how murky the terms of intervention are, even in the most clear-cut cases. The Greeks were responsible for several atrocities, murdering some 7000 Turks, many of them civilians, in 1821 at Tripolitza. But the philhellenes won the propaganda battle, even if Castlereagh and Metternich furiously resisted calls for intervention. For an arch-reactionary like the Austrian Foreign Minister Metternich, all the swooning over Greece recalled "certain addresses presented in a time that nobody likes to recall...that is, the gory horrors of the French Revolution." (Metternich rooted outright for an Ottoman victory.) With Russia clamouring for war to defend its Orthodox coreligionists, and Britain straining to remain neutral, the Ottomans pressed their campaign against Greece.

After brokering a treaty in London, the Allies eventually forced concessions on the Ottomans, and sank their fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827 to drive home the point. But was this the first humanitarian intervention of the modern age? The answer remains complicated. Much as in the present day, it is difficult to extract the pure humanitarian motives from conflicts that pay clear strategic dividends to the combatants. Certainly, Russia's interests were served by an independent Christian state that bordered on Ottoman territory.

While many Britons were moved by the suffering that unfolded in Greece, Britain had its eye on checking Russian expansion as much as it did on the oppression of the Greeks. For much of the 19th century, Britain favoured the Ottoman Empire as a vital counterweight to Russian expansionism. After Greece, humanitarian actions became much the exception, not the regular practice, of Europe's liberal powers. As Bass himself points out, Britain did little to counter Austria's violent suppression of Italian and Hungarian revolutionaries during upheavals of 1848; nor could it do much when Russia crushed a Polish uprising in 1863. Liberal solidarity had its limits.

But Austria and Russia were military superpowers, where a weakened Ottoman Empire was not. Britain and France would find themselves drawn again into conflicts with the Ottomans, first over atrocities against Syrians in 1860-1861, and then in Bulgaria in 1876-1877, after a series of massacres against Christians that outraged public sentiment in Great Britain. With the consent of Britain and the Ottoman sultan, France sent troops to Syria to settle a conflict that pitted Maronite Christians against the Druze, who had burnt Maronite villages and churches. (In France, a hysterical press frothed about Christian oppression, but, if anything, the Druze, who were dealt with severely by the Ottomans and Christians alike, needed international protection.)

For Bass, the Syrian occupation is a model, however flawed: a limited engagement, made possible by international co-operation, that preserved Ottoman sovereignty. Even if the mission suited France's imperial aims in the Middle East, as Bass points out, France quickly left the region as required by treaty. The situation in Bulgaria would prove far more nettlesome, and plunge Russia into an ill-fated war with Turkey. In one of the great political showdowns of the 19th century, Gladstone and Disraeli clashed over Britain's response to the outrages in the East. Gladstone is one of Bass's heroes — an anti-imperialist and champion of human rights who denounced Disraeli's support of the Ottomans. Gladstone, "committed to co-operative multilateralism", favoured a cautious alliance with Russia to protect the rights of Christians. Russia, however, had its own strategic calculus to pursue, and invaded Bulgaria without international consent.

Bass is not merely writing a scholarly study; he has a mind to demonstrate that "humanitarian intervention can be a part of a wider grand strategy of free republics." Bass writes that "The nineteenth century shows how the practice of humanitarian intervention can be managed." But does it? As with much of his argument, the answer is yes, and no.

There is a kind of anarchy in international relations that passes for order, and the historical lessons Bass wants us to draw are perhaps less clear than he thinks. His consideration of the Armenian genocide, which highlights Woodrow Wilson's inaction, cautiously lionises Theodore Roosevelt, who, it seemed, wanted to invade half the countries on earth. Of Wilson's plans for a new global system, Bass comments "The world order envisioned after the First World War did not aim to establish a regular way of stopping mass atrocity." And so it continues to this day.

Bass concedes that intervention is a drastic measure, but he outlines a series of protocols he suggests might be employed in worst-case scenarios. The first is pursuit of diplomatic consensus, but even this is not clear-cut: it might mean going outside the UN, where China and Russia wield veto power, leaving us to debate how we define "consensus" when certain states are sure to reject it.

Bass, mindful of critics on the left who see in humanitarian intervention nothing but veiled imperialism, works to craft a definition that eludes that charge, but he is not always successful. He is keen to point out that many of the 19th century humanitarians — Gladstone, chiefly — were also anti-imperialists. But it often takes an imperial power to mount a humanitarian campaign, though Bass suggests that regional powers might take the lead, as Australia did in East Timor. (But where is South Africa on Zimbabwe?) If there is to be a military action, Bass advises "keep the mission short, keep the force size small, and give no advantages to the intervening power. Humanitarian interventions are emergency steps, one should be suspicious of a permanent emergency."

For all his recommendations, Bass still leaves us in a quandary. In an alternative universe, liberal powers, per Bass's protocols, might have mounted interventions to halt genocide in Rwanda and Darfur, or Cambodia; in the actual world, they did not. Bass points to Bosnia and Kosovo, but these were limited actions that ignited controversies that remain unsettled. If anything, by now the principles of humanitarian intervention should be enshrined in the discourse of global politics, but they remain as fraught — and, perhaps, unrealistic — as ever. That the most powerful liberal state in the world invaded Iraq, a point on which Bass is curiously muted, and then later used the rhetoric of humanitarian concern to sanction a lengthy military campaign only further challenges his case. Perhaps "free republics" have a responsibility to protect human rights, but for now they are all of them a coalition of the unwilling.

"It is a complex fate to be an American," Henry James famously observed. But it was an even more complex fate to be a James. One of five children — his oldest brother was William, the pioneering philosopher and social thinker — James, along with his siblings, grew up under the tutelage of a strong-willed, mercurial and footloose father who hopped, family in tow, from New York to Boston to London and the Swiss Alps. Inhabitants of no one country so much as they were natives of a place called Jamesland, the family followed its own customs and peculiar rituals.

Brisk, chatty, and sometimes ridiculously florid, House of Wits is an engrossing if heavy handed biography of this eccentric and fascinating Victorian-era clan. If the achievements of the famous brothers bulk large in the story of the Jameses, Paul Fisher has thought passionately about the family as a whole — patriarch Henry Sr, and his wife Mary, lesser known brothers Bob and Wilkie and the lone sister, Alice.

There have been other books on the Jameses, by RWB Lewis and FO Matthiessen, the great post war Americanist and scholar of 19th century literature. But where they were reticent, even demure about sex and love, Fisher, wise to faddish theories about gender and sexuality, proposes a James family for the 21st century — for the age of Oprah and Dr Phil. "We can talk about the Jameses now without holding back or turning our heads," Fisher writes, "and we are significantly more able to interpret what lies behind their hard-to-read expressions."

For Fisher, there is very little that is inscrutable about the family. He uncovers a welter of pathologies — alcoholism, depression, sundry neuroses, dark obsessions, repressed sexual desires, even hints of incest. With a nod to our time, Fisher describes the Jameses as the "the forerunners of today's Prozac-loving, depressed or bipolar, self-conscious, narcissistic, fame-seeking, self-dramatised, hard-to-mate-or-to-marry Americans." Yet they hardly need such a glibly contemporary gloss to hold our attention. The Jameses are fascinating on their own terms.

Henry Sr, the son of a Scotch-Irish emigrant turned business tycoon, was an unorthodox thinker with a mystic bent. Sustained by a family income, the one time seminary student, under the spell of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, fancied himself a freethinking visionary, though he was more prone to bombast. ("When I take a few glasses of wine," he once mused "I am ready to measure my strategy with Bonaparte, and...to encounter Anthony in rivalry for Cleopatra.") In the 1840s, he delivered public lectures on abstract religious topics that left his audiences baffled — and bored.

Henry Sr's unconventional notions about the conduct of life would profoundly affect his children, who were born in rapid succession between 1842 and 1848. So would his temperament. Fragile, wracked by insecurity, impulsive and unpredictable, Henry James Sr passed onto his children a mixed inheritance. He was an alcoholic, and could resort to violence when provoked — William remembered how "Father used to spank me with a paper cutter" in their house on New York's 14th Street. But he also wanted his children to benefit from his offbeat theories about pedagogy and child rearing.

It would be a fraught experiment. In 1855, he packed up his young brood, and went to Europe, where he hoped they would have a "sensual education." As Henry James Jr ("Harry") later recalled, he and his siblings became "hotel children". Vagabonds, they hopped from Switzerland, France and England, as Henry Sr looked for inspiration and enlightenment. His mind would quickly alight on a new idea, and his children were expected to follow. "Like some child in sandbox," Fisher writes, "he formed and then destroyed version after version of his children, never satisfied with the results."

If he resorts sometimes to a cut-out rate Victorianese (Henry Sr worried about William succumbing to the temptations of a "rosy housemaid or impetuous piano-playing minx"), Fisher diligently tracks the family's chronic travelling. Henry Sr's journeys would establish a central dynamic in the life of the Jameses: pilgrimage. Even if they were bound by nettlesome ties, they were forever trying to break free of one another. In time, the James children divided loosely into three tiers, with eldest siblings William and Harry at the top, Bob and Wilkie lost somewhere in the middle, and Alice occupying an unfortunate place all her own.

Fisher's treatment of Bob and Wilkie is poignant and substantial. Henry Sr didn't know quite what to do with his middle sons. If William and Henry drifted to the arts — both dabbled in painting as young men — Wilkie and Bob could never get out from under the long shadow of their talented older brothers. Both served with distinction in the Civil War (Wilkie was badly wounded) but their post-war careers foundered. Bob, a railway clerk, descended into alcoholism and a troubled marriage in the Midwest, while Wilkie failed in business ventures. They were an unhappy lot.

But as Fisher makes clear, none of the James children were really destined for happiness. Though he was his father's favourite, William was dogged by depression and impotence. Trained as a doctor at Harvard, he was reluctant to practice, and turned to the new field of psychology. Groping to understand his own state of mind and spiritual needs — "he himself was his most engrossing patient," Fisher writes — William struck out on a path that would culminate in two classics, The Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

William's relationship with his brother Henry was intense and charged. Following the lead of Leon Edel, author of perhaps the greatest Henry James biography, Fisher contends there was tinge of homoeroticism to their bond. The question has swirled around Henry, and, in recent years, academics have made heavy weather about Henry's famously ambiguous sexuality.

A lifelong bachelor who found his home in Europe, in the great houses of London and crumbling palazzos of Italy, Henry created some of the great female characters in English literature, even if his ambivalence about women bordered on misogyny. Fisher makes a fairly indisputable case on the matter of Henry James and women, but about his alleged homosexuality, the author makes some debatable claims. James revelled in ambiguity; it was his métier. He is always hinting at themes just beyond the realm of comprehension — "obscure" is a key word in the James lexicon. Whatever James repressed or kept secret, whatever desires he checked and contained, he made an art out his buried passions.

Was James a homosexual? There is much conflicting evidence, though nothing incontrovertible confirming he was, even the flowery letters he wrote his male acquaintances, many of them younger and some of them openly gay. (The Irish novelist Colm Toibin, one of James's best critics, put it this way: "he covered his tracks magnificently.") Fisher, however, tries to steer us to a more a definitive conclusion. A believer in the theory that silence is code for tacit homosexual desire, Fisher is rather unsubtle in his dealings with Henry's sexuality.

Looking at James's 1886 novel The Bostonians, which ostensibly concerns feminism and its discontents, Fisher argues that there are deflected glimpses of Henry's longing for Paul Zhukovsky, a painter who James knew in the 1880s. "For Harry, though, The Bostonians functioned as a roadblock, not a road," Fisher contends." "Once again, he was *not [ital] writing about the likes of Paul Zhukovsky (or John Addington Symonds, a homosexual acquaintance whom he claimed to William never to have met.)" A clever reading perhaps, but specious and unpersuasive all the same. Sometimes, a silence is just a silence.

Henry's later years, his emergence as "The Master" and author impenetrably baroque works like The Golden Bowl — the novel exasperated William, who counselled his brother to try something with "absolute straightness in the style" — occupy a good portion of House of Wits.

Fisher's handling of William becomes a little secondary, though his philosophical contributions are of major importance. (Fisher gives slight consideration to William's writings on pragmatism, a signature development in American intellectual history). This is foremost a biography of emotional and psychological states.

Whatever the flaws of Fisher's approach, there is a rewarding fullness to his account of the family's nettlesome ties and crisscrossing relationships. Fisher has takes an expansive view of the Jameses, and includes portraits of cousins Kitty and Minny Temple; Mary's sister, Katherine Walsh, "the travel hungry maiden aunt" who became a kind of surrogate mother to the children; and Alice Gibbens James, wife of William.

"The role of women in the James family is essential to their story," Fisher writes. Yet it was never easy being a James woman. For all his newfangled ideas, Henry Sr thought of women as domestic helpmates and little more. Such attitudes had a profound effect on perhaps the most tragic of the Jameses, Alice. Plagued by mysterious ailments and prone to hysterical fits, the youngest of the siblings emerges as one of the most interesting figure in the family saga. Of all the Jameses, her fate was the most complex. Fisher casts Alice as an actress whose most extraordinary performance was her illness. Beset by her neuroses, Alice, an invalid for much her life, was nonetheless an intellectual in her own right; she had a literary mind second only to Henry, who called her diaries "rare-wondrous". It was worthy praise from someone who did not give it easily.

With such descriptive panache, Thirlwell allows himself plenty of latitude to explore his preoccupations with language, literary technique, and how the novel developed into an art form. It's also an excuse for self-indulgence. I'm all for innovation, but Thirlwell's attempt to break out of the confines of a stuffy genre can lead him down some blind alleyways, and leave the reader scrambling to keep up. And his fondness for cute aphorisms — "Like life, literature is lived forwards, and understood backwards" — tends to obscure the thrust of his argument more than illuminate it.

That said, the 30-year-old Thirlwell has distilled the wisdom from what amounts to a lifetime of reading onto his pages. Considering the work of an eclectic who's-who of world letters — Gustave Flaubert, Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, Saul Bellow, Miguel de Cervantes, James Joyce, Franz Kakfa, Italo Svevo, Vladimir Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, Georges Perec, Bohumil Hrabal — Thirlwell ranges across time, space, borders, and several languages.

He doesn't really make a formal argument so much as expound on several themes. He argues that the history of the novel is deeply bound up with the way writers dealt with the quotidian, what Tolstoy called "real life, with its essential interests of health and sickness, toil and rest." So-called "real life" was mundane, unheroic, even boring; but this didn't render it ineligible for artistic consideration. Far from it: Real life had enormous potential. Flaubert, Thirlwell's presiding spirit, triumphed in studying the way his characters tried to escape the clutches of health and sickness, toil and rest.

For Thirlwell, the novel is almost a utopian form, infinitely flexible in its reach, able to transcend the specifics of language and culture. He is a true believer in the imperfect art of translation and the portability of style and technique. The limitations of translation make it all the more suitable for its task. "The history of the novel," he writes, "and the history of translation, is happy with the idea of mistakes — a more haphazard definition of accuracy."

An expansive, unbound critic, Thirlwell makes a series of unexpected connections between writers of vastly divergent styles and eras. Perec, a postmodern trickster, and Tolstoy, the supreme 19th-century realist, aren't usually yoked together as fellow travelers, but Thirlwell suggests they were linked by a common concern: "With their differing styles, Georges Perec and Leo Tolstoy were saying the same thing as Gustave Flaubert. Because what is real? The only thing which is real is not the extraordinary, not the historical or surreal or romantic: it is prosiness, it is the everyday."

Thirlwell covers so much ground that even he gets lost along the way. Digression is a virtue in his eyes, even if his zigzagging leaves you mildly disoriented. "The Delighted States" is best read as a collection of literary anecdotes, and Thirlwell has gathered many. He is fascinated by the ways writers read and learn across the barriers of language. Translation is never a matter of mere words — "I'm not convinced that a style is so linguistic," Thirlwell argues.

Case in point: In the 1930s, the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, author of the oddball classic "Ferdydurke," wrote an admiring essay on James Joyce. However, Gombrowicz did not read Joyce in Polish translation — there was none — but in French. Gombrowicz despaired that he could not read Joyce in Polish, but Thirlwell says this was unnecessary. A Polish writer reading a novel written in English in a French translation is fitting metaphor for the principles Thirlwell advances: "Just as most of a style survives a talented translation into one language, because it is a quality of vision ... it survives its talented translation into a further language, as well. Style is international."

Translators may quibble with Thirlwell's optimism about the limitless possibilities of rendering words composed in one language into another. Thirlwell doesn't want to get hung up on technicalities, though the fine points of translation are hardly insignificant or trivial. (Still, he is game enough to append his own version of Nabokov's novella "Mademoiselle O," translated from the French.) But "The Delighted States" is a not a how-to manual or beginner's guide, nor is it pure literary criticism. Thirlwell's animated commentary belongs on a shelf all its own.

Kingsley became known for his blimpish conservatism, his loathing for anything that smacked of intellectual pretension, his suspicion for faddish social trends, which he made fun of in novels like Jake's Thing (1974), where he took aim at psychoanalysis, and his contempt for anything foreign. Martin, under the influence of his literary heroes Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, fashioned a unique Transatlantic idiom that married wise- up street slang and a Dickensian obsession with grotesques to weighty conceits like the Holocaust, nuclear war, totalitarianism and terrorism.

There haven't been too many father and son acts in British literary history, not that Amis & Son were exactly a family firm. There are wild stylistic divergences between the younger and older Amis: Kinsgley thought Bellow and Nabokov were rubbish, yet their relationship, which Martin wrote about tenderly in his memoir Experience, could be warm, even comradely.

Powell devotes the lion's share of his book to Kingsley, which gives Amis & Son an uneven feel. (Of course, the elder Amis lived to a ripe old age, so there's more to say.) Powell admires Kingsley up to a point. He finds a good deal of Amis senior's work uneven, and, in some cases, just plain wretched. I've often thought that Kingsley Amis wrote nothing as good as Lucky Jim, and Powell has done little to change my mind. If he admires the early romantic comedy Take a Girl Like You (1960), Powell's appreciations feel forced, as if he's had to talk himself into it. He enjoys Lucky Jim, but he feels a "lurking sense of an evasive hollow at its heart." Kinsgley's early novels, with their professional and academic settings, are "constrictingly middle class in their range."

Other times, Powell completely loses it. Trashing Kingsley for writing about Ian Fleming, he lambasts Amis for "his frightened denial of the complexities of good and evil, his avoidance of novels which he feared might be too difficult for him (his reluctance to read James Faulkner, for instance) and his lifelong recourse to easy escapism or popular cultural forms and their uncomplicated villains." This is a pretty strenuous indictment, and not altogether fair. Before the rise of academic cultural studies, Kingsley found value in popular entertainments, a point that seems to evades Powell altogether.

But Powell musters some appreciation for Kinsgley's place in the mainstream of English comic writing, and the solidity of his fiction: "people have pasts, and families, and futures; they know who lives next door, across the street, who's to be found in the pub and the corner shop. It's a very British scale of things, one which Kingsley would cherish and admire all his life..." Without getting too Freudian, Powell argues that Martin rejected such qualities. Indeed, the younger Amis always looked across the sea to America for his stylistic cues. In his own way, Martin Amis has always been an émigré. He loved the bigness and unruliness of his American masters. He was—and remains—a superb critic of Bellow, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike.

Not that Powell gives him much credit. Picking on Martin is old hat for the British literary classes, but Powell goes after Amis with vigour. Powell gives early Amis (The Rachel Papers, his debut, and 1978's Success) a passing grade. The Amis of Money (1981) and London Fields (1989) and beyond is a different story. Powell finds himself increasingly exasperated by Martin's ambitions. He accuses the younger Amis, with his imported techniques and his seeming contempt for realism, of writing a kind of gibberish. Amis's cleverness conceals an emptiness, Powell contends: "his fictional worlds, even at their most ambitious, seem insubstantial: typically, they rely on ingenious conceits to disguise their lack of foundations and, like conjuring tricks, they work wonderfully until quite suddenly they don't."

There are other problems. John Self, the debauched narrator of Money, remarks, "I'm not allergic to the 20th century. I'm addicted to the 20th century." You might say the same thing about Martin. He has taken it upon himself to probe the inhuman forces of the last century and of our own time; in the last few years, he has become a pundit of the September 11 era. More often than not, this can leave him sounding like a gasbag.

And, perhaps because of this preoccupation with inhumanity, there are few recognisably human characters in Amis's fiction. John Self and Keith Talent, the hooligan thief of London Fields, are ferocious creations, but they exist on one level. Dickens, a writer Amis is sometimes compared to, does a good bad guy; but he also has a tender side that seems missing in Amis. Martin Amis knows what can kill us, but little about what makes us live.

For Naipaul, now 75, being disagreeable is a way of being alive; he likes to wind people up — and he generally succeeds. In Britain, Sir Vidia is practically a national institution of literary gossip; he's given up writing novels, but his bluster keeps him in the papers. (An anthology of Naipaul's vituperations would be immense, but his spleen is captured in his remarks about the people of Trinidad, where he was born in 1932: "These people live purely physical lives, which I find contemptible ... It makes them interesting only to chaps in universities who want to do compassionate studies about brutes.") For an alleged recluse who lives in the English countryside, Naipaul has always had a way of generating publicity. The English literary classes seem obsessed with his private life, and the recent publication of The World is What It Is, Patrick French's authorised life of Naipaul, has given them plenty to chatter about.

Greeted with considerable acclaim in Britain, the book is a monument to Naipaul; it is also a disturbing portrait of a fussy, resentful, emotionally ruthless man. French salutes Naipaul's literary gifts, but he also chronicles, in voyeuristic detail, Naipaul's darkest sexual secrets and the cruelties he inflicted on his first wife, Patricia, and long time mistress, Margaret. (That Naipaul himself signed off on the book is an act of sadomasochistic fortitude.) Naipaul's achievements — 29 books at present count: fiction, reportage, travelogue, criticism and autobiography, a Nobel Prize in 2001 and sundry other garlands — and his single minded dedication to honing his prose apparently came at a great human cost, to himself and his partners. Naipaul could not do it alone; tyrannical in his private life, he was also helplessly dependent on both Margaret and Patricia for emotional and literary support.

If anything, French's labours confirm an essential truth about Naipaul, which is that he writes out of an unappeasable sense of desolation. French takes his title from the opening line of A Bend in the River, perhaps Naipaul's best novel: "The world is what it is, and men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

For Naipaul, who has a profound fear of erasure, "nothing" is a key term. Singularly obsessed with his beginnings in Trinidad, Naipaul has compulsively worked and reworked the notion that to be born on a small island in the Caribbean is to be born into a kind of nothingness.

Conquered by slave owners and subjected to the savage rigours of plantation economics, the West Indies — "places of the lash"– are bereft of any useful inheritance. "The history of these islands can never be satisfactorily told," Naipaul has written. "Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies." For Naipaul, such "small places with simple economies bred small people with small destinies...their literary possibilities, like their economic possibilities, were as narrow as their human possibilities."

Naipaul's Trinidadian identity is especially vexatious. In Trinidad's hodgepodge of races — African, Asian, European — Naipaul could see no solidity; only fragmentation. His own people had originally come from India as indentured servants — "slavery with an expiry date," French calls it — and their descendants tried to recreate Indian village life in their new environment; but this was not an authentic creation, only a deracinated version of the real thing. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Naipaul recalled how he and his family lived "in our own fading India," and the narrowness it enforced on them: "It made for an extraordinary self-centeredness. We looked inward; we lived out our days; the world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about nothing."

Naipaul was once asked by an interviewer why he had come to Britain — he went to Oxford in 1950 on scholarship, and after graduation, worked at the BBC — and he replied tartly, "I came to join civilisation." Such remarks, and his chastened views on India, Islam, and post-colonial liberation movements in Africa and elsewhere have earned Naipaul a reputation as a political reactionary. This is not exactly the case. Both the right and left have misread Naipaul. He gives no comfort to liberals, but he is not one to take sides; he remains an observer — with a notably sharp point of view.

Naipaul's work contains politics, French writes, but not a political message. In a letter to his wife Patricia in the early 1950s, Naipaul described his viewpoint: "Now don't believe I want to reform the human race," he told her. "I am the spectator, the flâneur par excellence. I am free of the emancipatory fire. I want to create myself, to work out my own philosophy that will bring me comfort. I want to see the good and the bad." Working out his own philosophy — and the forms adequate to contain it — would become Naipaul's central preoccupation as he matured as a writer. ("Half a writer's work is the discovery of his subject." Naipaul once wrote.) Finding the centre, a way in the world, became his vocation.

He has often said that the traditional form of the novel proved inadequate to his needs. If he had come to civilisation to escape the stagnation of his homeland, the European literary tradition would prove bewildering: "Great novelists wrote about highly organised societies. I had no such society; I couldn't share the assumptions of the writers; I didn't see my world reflected in theirs." Hard up, living in a dreary succession of London bedsits in the late Fifties and early Sixties, Naipaul struggled to assimilate these customs as he tried to give shape to his experiences in Trinidad.

These efforts culminated in an early masterpiece, A House for Mr Biswas. A loving tribute to his father Seepersad, a journalist who Naipaul has claimed as his decisive influence. This big, sturdy novel is a classic of post-colonial literature, but it is also a creative dead end. Naipaul could do little more with an alien tradition; the old-fashioned novel could only take him so far. (Whether Naipaul should even be called a novelist is a matter for debate; his own description is better: "a manager of narrative.")

But Naipaul's creative crisis pushed him in a new direction. Toward the end of the Sixties, consumed with a need to explore new societies, Naipaul uprooted himself once more. ("VS Naipaul was of everywhere and of nowhere," French notes perceptively. "His instincts and prejudices were intact, but his eyes were wide open, missing nothing.") He found his theme: surveying the wreckage of "half made societies that seemed doomed to remain half made".

He produced one of his most powerful works, The Loss of El Dorado, a surreal, horrifying study of Trinidad's colonial past. (Naipaul thought the effort a "dud".) India would become an increasing preoccupation for Naipaul, though his writings on the country of his ancestors were strongly critical in tone. ("The dereliction of India overwhelms the visitor," begins one piece.) He was out of sympathy with the slogans of an era inflamed by racial protest. In Jamaica on assignment for the New York Review of Books, Naipaul complained bitterly in a 1969 letter of "protest after protest, enemy after enemy: this is what passes for political thought in these primitive societies."

If Naipaul's political opinions were sharp, even heretical, he wrote with a humane subtlety on collapsing empires and the violent paradoxes of freedom. Naipaul was a member of no avant-garde — his finely calibrated prose, with its measured pauses and fastidiously deployed semi-colons, is beautiful for its compact simplicity — but his life of habitual transit, his estrangement from any fixed boundary, drove him to tinker with different perspectives and formats.

"Displacement gave Vidia a distinct view of the world," French writes. He would fuse the imaginary and the real, memoir and the make-believe, in startling ways. In a Free State, which won the Booker Prize in 1971, opens with a documentary fragment, a ferry trip from Egypt to Greece — "Even from the quay it looked overcrowded, like a refugee ship": a perfect metaphor for Naipaul's concerns — and then moves to a novella set in an unnamed African country, and a dazzling series of short stories pitched in different registers.

"People are at their most creative when things are very disturbed," Naipaul has said. From the Seventies onward, Naipaul would seek out turbulence, both in his relationships and in his travels to the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and South America. His fiction and journalism would take on a nasty sexual charge, but he did some of his best work while things around him were falling apart. Ever watchful, he would observe and record in long books on the Muslim world and India. French's conclusion about Naipaul is just: "Repeatedly he had to recreate or mask himself, clearing away his past, in order to become the apparently stateless, hyper- perceptive global observer who could, as a book reviewer once put it, look into the mad eye of history and not blink."

Yet there remains a troubling question of how much Naipaul's deep grievances occluded his vision. Consumed by the stranglehold the past has on the present, the decay of tradition, the corrosive deformations of imperialism, and the ironies of liberation, Naipaul has collected much data to confirm his prejudices. There may be no political messages in Naipaul's work; but there is little hope either.

An intense, brassy, fast-talking bantam weight, the 38-year-old Ferrante, who’s joined me to talk about his new memoir, “Unlocked: A Journey from Prison to Proust” (Harper, $25.95), can expound on just about any topic — penal reform, world history, literature, theology, you name it — and peppers his remarks with references to Churchill, Napoleon, and Disraeli. There’s a lot about him that’s unexpected. Consider this: Ferrante, a former Gambino family associate raised in a Catholic home, is now an Orthodox Jew.

A hardboiled tale of crime, punishment, and redemption, “Unlocked” charts Ferrante’s violent life pulling off heists for the Gambinos and his eventual downfall in 1994, when a mighty trifecta of the Secret Service, the FBI, and Nassau County put him behind bars. Ferrante took a plea and served nine years in several New York jails.

He doesn’t downplay the brutality of life inside — sexual abuse was rampant and Ferrante had to fend off would-be attackers — but doing time would change his life for the better. Prison became a kind of university and spiritual retreat: putting his mob days behind him, Ferrante turned to books, devouring Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” and “Anna Karenina”; started to write and embraced Judaism as he tried to atone for his past misdeeds.

It’s a pretty incredible story, but Ferrante, who grew up in Flushing and now lives upstate, almost didn’t tell it. After his release in 2003 — he successfully appealed his own case — Ferrante moved to Massapequa and hoped to publish a 1,000-page novel set in the antebellum South, but a pal convinced him to write a memoir.

“When I got out, I didn’t want to think about jail,” he recalls, tucking into a steaming, oven-fresh knish. “I couldn’t even watch ‘The Sopranos.’ But my friend goes ‘Lou, you gotta give it to them; that’s what people like. Write whatever you want later.’” Ferrante acknowledges that mafia lore remains ever popular. He’s up front about why “the life” appealed to a working-class kid who didn’t have much direction. “It was a place to hang my hat,” he says of the camaraderie he found in his crew. (In “Unlocked” he writes, “An eighteen year old in the Midwest, searching for these same feelings, might join the army or marines.”) Readers will find plenty of action — the book opens with Ferrante sticking a gun into a truck driver’s mouth — but don’t expect much on John and “Junior” Gotti.

He may be done with mob, yet Ferrante still has connections from back in the day. He’s proud he never ratted anyone out, and though I press for specifics on the Dapper Don and his son, he clams up. Alluding to several other higher-ups he knows, Ferrante adds that he “didn’t want to offend anybody. I want to be able to come to Manhattan for the rest of my life.”

Still, Ferrante offers up many provocative opinions. He’s astonished that Sammy “the Bull” Gravano turned informant against the Gambinos but points out that the crackdown on the mob tested even the most hardened of wise guys. “I think the sentences are outrageous,” he says. “I was facing 125 years; I never killed anybody. Give me five and see if I turn my life around — give me a hundred next time.”

Waxing philosophical, Ferrante says his circumstances could be anybody’s: “I think we’re all the same — whatever I did, you’re capable of doing, and whatever you’ve done in your life, I’m capable of doing.”

For Ferrante, such insight is hard won. He tells me how the stern morality of Judaism gives him a vital perspective on his life. “I felt it,” he says of the Torah’s teachings. “I know if you screw up, you’re going to get punished. I suffered and know it’s true.” He keeps kosher at home, and doesn’t eat pork anymore. But that’s no problem — he knows a butcher out in Wantagh who does a nice kosher braciole.