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Article: The continental drift
- Article from:
- The Spectator
- Article date:
- September 9, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Spectator Sep 9, 2006. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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THE CULTURE OF THE EUROPEANS by Donald Sassoon Harper Press, £30, pp. 1617, ISBN 0002558793 . £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655
The amazing thing, really, is that this has become a subject at all.
Twenty years ago, you would have been more likely to find a book written by a fish on the subject of water than a history of the last 200 years of European culture. A subject implies limits, and until recently this was just the water we swam in. Now, perhaps, European culture seems less all-enveloping, and the possibilities of alternatives seem more acute.
It has lost the status of a universal standard, and has just become one history among others.
All the same, it makes a colossal ...